David McCarthy

The inspiration for this article came after reading several articles by Scott Berry, former writer of the A Statistician Reads the Sports Page column. I found two of his articles particularly interesting. One discussed the dominance of Tiger Woods in golf using data from the beginning of the 1999 PGA Tour season through the 2001 Masters Tournament. The other focused on leisure sports such as bass fishing and darts. In both, a Bayesian hierarchical model (with a normal distribution for the data) was used to estimate the abilities of the golfers and the fishermen, as well as the difficulty of the tournaments in which they participated. I began to consider if there were any other sports, whether “leisure” or “athletic,” that had not been thoroughly investigated and whose data could be modeled in a similar fashion. The sport of ten-pin bowling immediately came to mind.

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