Mox Sports Stats Blog

Baseball has been the best example of sports resisting change throughout it's history. Baseball's detractors cite this as the cause of its slowly decreasing viewership. There have been spikes in interest such as the 'Steroid-Era' when long ball hitters like Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Barry Bonds drew hundreds of thousands of fans a year to watch seemingly impossible amounts of home runs. But sadly, in terms of TV ratings, the league cracked down on PED's and things began trending down once again. The MLB needed a big, new way to revamp how the game is played. Most people would consider this decline to be the beginning of advanced statistics in baseball. What most people don't realize, is that this movement started nearly fifty years ago, but nobody paid it any attention. In 1952 Topps first added baseball statistics to the back of their cards. The majority of these were very basic statistics, often called the counting stats because no calculations have to

With March Madness over and summer coming nearer into focus, we are going to switch our main focus over from Gophers basketball to baseball. We will be covering the Minnesota Twins and the St. Paul Saints this season. We will also be doing general write-ups about the statistical research we are doing, as well as statistics based stories from across the baseball world. This weekend we will have a brief history of advanced baseball statistics and a look into their future possibilities. Stay tuned.

March Madness Well Gophers fans, the season didn't exactly end on the most fulfilling not. The loss to Middle Tennessee was a result of lots of very unfortunate coincidences. The first, and most obvious of these was the untimely injury to senior graduate transfer Akeem Springs. MTSU's stifling zone defense had only one flaw: Three Point Shooters. Without Akeem Springs' shooting ability the Gophers were forced to stay away from outside shooting. All the inside play led to foul trouble for senior center Reggie Lynch, although a few silly mistakes didn't do him any favors. Another major factor was the tournaments seeding. As practically any sports fan in the Minnesota-Wisconsin area heard, there was some controversy involving which teams were over or under-seeded. Wisconsin, who beat the Gophers twice in the regular season and who also went further in the Big Ten Tournament, was given an 8 seed. The Gophers were given a 5 seed, and we're matched up against a team tha