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Mathematician Predicts Yankees To Dominate
anthemaniac writes "Computerized projections in sports are nothing new, but Bruce Bukiet of the New Jersey Institute of Technology has developed a model that seems to work pretty well. He projects how many games a Major League Baseball team will win by factoring in how each hitter ought to do against each pitcher in every game. His crystal ball says the Yankees will win 110 games this year, a pretty safe bet, many might agree. But he also projects all the divisional winners. He claims to be right more than wrong in five of the past six years."
Wow, I never expected somebody that I knew to get on Slashdot. Bruce Bukiet is my Calculus II professor at NJIT.
He mentioned this before a few times, including today after that article made it to the most popular spot on Yahoo! News. This is more of a hobby for him than an official project.
From what he has said in the past about the model, it tends to overestimate the Yankees, among other reasons, because they often buy good players at the end of their prime. Thus the players won't play as well as they had in the past. He hasn't used it to make any bets. For the model, coming within a game or two of the actual results is considered a good prediction.
As some people above said, the model isn't intended to be extremely accurate, and is frequently off by a significant amount. The interviews he does are more to get people interested in math, and to see how it has real use, rather than to try and show off. He used to go into more details in the past, but doesn't now because they tend to confuse the interviewer, and don't make it into the final article.
Some pages of his own about the project are:http://m.njit.edu/~bukiet/baseball/baseball.html
http://www.egrandslam.com/