Wake Forest MS student. @CalPoly alum. Formerly @DrivelineBB, @SLOTribune, Sounders FC.
Seattle, WA
Joined September 2015
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Best challenge record in baseball (Stephenson, 83-37) is worth about zero runs once you count the umpire misses never challenged
Blog Post: Probably-Right Valuation for ABS Challenge Skill: Is JT the best, or worst, in the league?
This is a super-long article, so give it a try and let me know what you think...
tangotiger.com/index.php/sit…
After nine games, the AFL rules are doing for offense exactly as the model predicted. Only the magnitude was wrong.
My original model under predicted XBH since it was trained on MLB data without marks.
A simple lookup table (green bar) is much closer to actual.
MLB's testing of new outfield positional rules in Arizona seems to be working exactly as intended.
Offense is WAY up.
Is that a good thing?
baseballamerica.com/stories/…
The week 2 changes moved outfielders ~5° towards CF, taking away more XBH in the gaps while adding some down the line.
Week 1: +1.42 runs per team-game on the old marks Week 2-present: +1.26 runs
Interesting use cases for player interviews, podcasts, etc.
Attribution was always a problem with media scrums.
Meet NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe 🎙️
An open-weight, promptable 30B MoE model with ~4B active parameters that brings transcription in 40 languages, speaker attribution, translation, contextual prompting and audio understanding into one checkpoint.
Watch it keep track of who said what when everyone’s talking at once.
1/ 🧵
Payroll tracks talent even more closely over longer stretches: .41 for one season, .51 averaged over 3 years, .56 over 5 (1997-2026).
The top is back to mid-2010s levels: 2.31x the league median in 2014, 2.06x now. The bottom five fell from 0.71x to 0.49x.
MLB’s $171M floor would lift them to 0.81x. 12 teams are under it, including every team still playing.
How playoff catchers stack up on ABS challenges vs. an average playoff catcher
Hicks (TB) +0.22 runs, 3-2
Contreras (MIL) +0.06, 7-7
Bailey (CLE) +0.01, 4-7
Hedges (CLE) −0.39, 2-0
Smith (LAD) −0.48, 2-2
Above the line = better than average
With Tango’s newer method, a lost challenge costs less as the game goes on. On average, a 3-0 challenge only has to be right 1 in 4 times early, 1 in 8 by the 7th, 1 in 20 in the 9th.
About half of these calls were wrong. Hitters challenged about 6% of them.
Across every count, 3-0 is the 5th most valuable call for a hitter to challenge, and the least challenged.
Blog Post: Probably-Right Valuation for ABS Challenge Skill: Is JT the best, or worst, in the league?
This is a super-long article, so give it a try and let me know what you think...
tangotiger.com/index.php/sit…
A 3-0 challenge isn’t that bad.
On average, a missed call at 3-0 is worth as much as 0-2. Hitters challenge it almost 6x less.
It’s a terminal count, just like 0-2. Would you let a hitter back into a count up 0-2 or get a K?
“Worst case you’re 3-1” is the pitcher’s best case.
