Luck, Law, and Baseball: Two Stories About Sports and Data

In the age of big data, sports possess many features that make them an ideal testing ground for new analyses and algorithms. In this lecture, Anette “Peko” Hosoi will describe two studies that lie at the intersection of sports and data.

Hosoi will later describe a collaboration with Major League Baseball to determine the physics behind the recent increase in the rate of home runs. In this part of the talk, Hosoi will enumerate different potential drivers for the observed increase and evaluate the evidence in the data (box score, ball tracking, weather, etc.) in support of each theory.

Hosoi is associate dean of engineering and Neil and the Jane Pappalardo Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT.