Dear CHANCE Readers,

Interest in statistics for many people begins with sports. Indeed, sports may be responsible for many statisticians becoming statisticians (professional and amateur). We devote this special issue of CHANCE to methods and applications in sports statistics.

It is an exciting time for statistics in sports. New technologies have created an explosion of data available for analyses. Meanwhile, Moneyball has brought attention to the value of statistical thinking in game strategies and player evaluation.

There are three major sport statistics symposia. Perhaps the most well known is the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference held annually in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is focused on many quantitative issues—especially business. MathSport International is a conference held biannually in Europe that focuses on statistics, econometrics, and operations research. Finally, there is the New England Symposium on Statistics in Sports (NESSIS) held biannually at Harvard University. NESSIS is organized and run by CHANCE column editor Mark Glickman and yours truly. We hope you will consider joining us for the next NESSIS, to be held on September 26, 2015, during which we will discuss statistical methods and applications.

Our lead-off hitter for this special sports issue is Jim Albert, editor of the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports. Jim evaluates streakiness (a popular topic in sports statistics) in home run hitting by evaluating spacings between consecutive home runs to see what streaky performances tell us about the “streaky abilities” of players.

Krista Fischer and Donald A. Berry describe the case of Andrus Veerpalu, an Estonian Olympic gold medalist in cross‐country skiing who tested positive for human growth hormone and was barred from competition. This decision was overturned on appeal by the Court of Arbitration for Sport. The rationale for the decision was faulty use of statistics in the interpretation of the test results.

Jim Albert then interviews Carl Morris, professor of statistics at Harvard University and a pioneer in the development of statistical methodologies in sports. Morris talks with Albert about using sports examples in research and the current and future use of statistical thinking in sports.

Hitting clean-up, Richard Smith, Scott Powers, and Jessi Cisewski discuss projections they made that were instrumental in the decision to tighten the qualifying time standards at the Boston Marathon by just over five minutes in all age groups. The methods used provide a systematic means of fine-tuning the qualifying times to achieve targeted goals for the overall field size and the distribution across sex and age groups.

Jason Wilson and Jarvis Greiner describe a curveball index, a methodology for measuring the quality of curve balls in baseball. They discuss how the index could be used to improve pitcher training as a scouting tool.

In the column A Statistician Reads the Sports Pages, Ben Baumer and Greg Matthews critically evaluate the wins-above-replacement (WAR) statistic in baseball—noting its lack of reproducibility, lack of a reference implementation, and lack of uncertainty—in “There Is No Avoiding WAR.” They propose an alternative for computing WAR.

Staying with the sports theme in The Big Picture, Nicole Lazar discusses Big Data in sports. She notes that big sport is big business, and big business means Big Data. In Visiphilia, Di Cook evaluates whether Nick Kyrgios can be a tennis champion.

In the column Taking a Chance in the Classroom, Andrew Bray, Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel, and Dalene Stangl discuss five concrete reasons your students should be learning to analyze data in the “reproducible” paradigm. Also, Christian Robert reviews Howard Wainer’s new book in Book Reviews and Wainer discusses recent changes to the SAT in Visual Revelations.

Once again, I would like to highlight the “Give Them a CHANCE” campaign and encourage you to sponsor deserving special students. As part of this program, I have recently sponsored two promising students (Kotera Mami and HaiYan Zheng) at Osaka University in Japan, where I am a visiting professor. They and their colleagues have made my visits to Japan memorable, enjoyable, and rewarding.

Scott Evans

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