THE BOOK cover
The Unwritten Book is Finally Written!
An in-depth analysis of: The sacrifice bunt, batter/pitcher matchups, the intentional base on balls, optimizing a batting lineup, hot and cold streaks, clutch performance, platooning strategies, and much more.
Read Excerpts & Customer Reviews

Buy The Book from Amazon


SABR101 required reading if you enter this site. Check out the Sabermetric Wiki. And interesting baseball books.
MOST RECENT ARTICLES
MAIL : You ask | We say

Advanced


THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Filter posts by...

 

Monday, March 16, 2009

Being behind is a good thing?

By Tangotiger, 09:39 AM

I know this is not true in baseball, nor in hockey (but I will tell you in hockey that the team that trails by exactly 2 goals scores and allows goals at a different rate than otherwise, almost certainly because the team ahead by 2 goals plays a defensive shell).  But in NCAA basketball:

Take games in which one team is ahead by a point at the half, as Duke was in the 2006 loss to North Carolina. On average, the team with the lead should win more than half of those games. The data, however, show the opposite. The team trailing by a point actually wins more often…

The authors reference their study (pdf).

(Hat tip: Dan)

(35) Comments • 2009/03/17 • SabermetricsRun_Win_ExpectancyOther Sports
Page 1 of 1 pages

Latest...

COMMENTS

May 24 16:59
Rooting for laundry

May 24 14:09
Neal Huntington’s best moves

May 24 13:14
Help needed with sticky issue…

May 24 12:07
How to beat the shift

May 24 11:11
Incredible story

May 24 09:41
Racial bias in card collecting: not the collectors, but the players on the cards

May 24 08:13
espnW for hockey: CBC’s WhileTheMenWatch.com

May 24 00:16
Psst… wanna intern… somewhere?

May 23 23:33
Inertia of player safety

May 23 22:11
NFLPA lawsuit against collusion

THREADS

March 16, 2009
Being behind is a good thing?