Yay Astros!
Mood: hopped up on baseball
Music: E. J. Jones -"Castle of Dromore"
Posted on 2005-10-20 09:21:00
Tags: baseball astros baseballstats
Words: 246

Hooray!

My nervous energy yesterday launched me into a new project. It started when I read the Crawfish Boxes (an Astros blog that is part of a network started by the founder of Daily Kos) after the 18 inning Game 4 of the Atlanta series. They talked about how amazing the game was, and talked about WPA, which after reading a link to the Hardball Times, discovered was the statistical relative frequency that a team will win in a given situation. They linked to the Win Expectancy Finder, which calculates WPA and is based on the data file that Phil Birnbaum put together that he made from Retrosheet game data. However, he only did games from 1979-1990, and Retrosheet has many more event logs for games.

So I decided to try to write a parser for them and create a data file like Birnbaum's, except with more games. It turns out the data file format is kinda hard to parse, but I have a script that mostly does it, so I'm somewhat close to my goal. I need to test it on more games - almost finished testing it on all 2004 games and tweaking it to make it work (luckily, there's redundant data in the files so I can fairly quickly tell when I did something wrong).

Anyway, that's my new project, and hopefully I'll put something up soon. I worked on it a lot last night before going to magic and while watching the game.

This backup was done by LJBackup.