Bang the can slowly with Ryan Elmore and Gregory J. Matthews

Open Source Sports

We discuss Bang the Can Slowly: An Investigation into the 2017 Houston Astros with Ryan Elmore (@rtelmore) and Gregory J. Matthews (@StatsInTheWild). This paper was the winner of the Carnegie Mellon Sports Analytics Conference Reproducible Research Competition in October 2020.

Ryan Elmore is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Business Information and Analytics in the Daniels College of Business at the University of Denver (DU). He earned his Ph.D. in statistics at Penn State University and worked as a Senior Scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory prior to DU. He has over 20 peer reviewed publications in outlets such as Journal of the American Statistical Association, Biometrika, The American Statistician, Big Data, Journal of Applied Statistics, Journal of Sports Economics, among others. He is currently an Associate Editor for the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports and recently organized the conference “Rocky Mountain Symposium on Analytics in Sports” hosted at DU.

Gregory Matthews completed his Ph.D. In statistics at the University of Connecticut in 2011. From 2011-2014, he was a post-doc in the School of Public Health at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Since 2014, he has been a professor of statistics at Loyola University Chicago. He was recently promoted to Associate professor with tenure in March 2020.

For additional references mentioned in the show:

• Tony Adams' (@adams_at) Houston Astros trash can banging data website: http://signstealingscandal.com/
• Ryan and Greg's GitHub repository with code and data: https://github.com/gjm112/Astros_sign_stealing
• The causal effect of a timeout at stopping an opposing run in the NBA by Connor Gibbs (@cgibbs_10), Ryan Elmore, and Bailey Fosdick (@baileyfosdick)