The vast quantity of available resources to teams regarding statistical analysis is staggering and in the minds of many underappreciated in the mainstream media. However, that does not mean there are not highly intellectual people with a love for the game who use their skills to highlight certain ways of optimizing and evaluating teams and players. While these sorts of discussions may require a higher level of thinking along with background knowledge increasingly robust levels of mathematics, they are still very interesting and valid to even the average fan.

With all this being said, there has been a conglomeration of mathematical (and not so mathematical) minds that have come together, with their love of sports, and have presented findings for years. The MIT Sloan Sports Conference takes place yearly (founded in 2006 by current Houston Rockets GM Daryl Morey) and the discussions and panels that take place take a highly analytic approach to anything sports related, whether it is ticket sales, statistics, refereeing, sports betting, and customer satisfaction and so on. There were a number of panels and papers released on baseball and its complexities, and all are worth a look. Archives can be found here along with the appropriate slideshows, but links will be provided below.

Topics include:

Baseball Analytics Discussions from 2013, 2012 (includes Mark Shapiro), 2011 and 2010.

Bill Simmons’ B.S Report with Bill James

Box Score Rebooted – The flaws in modern day statistics and how box scores can be improved.

Moneyball Revisited – How certain metrics can determine over and undervalued players in baseball.

Hitting ‘Em Where They Are – A look at how a pitcher can (or can’t) control the batted balls

The Value Of Positional Flexibility – How valuable is positional flexibility versus the randomness of injuries.

Paired Pitching – A very stat-intensive look at how pitching has changed and no one has noticed.

Ease of Domination – A look at standard deviation in baseball history and how stats change from year to year.

Predicting the Next Pitch – A creation of a better way to predict the next pitch by a varying number of circumstances

The Sixth Tool – Training Baseball Pitch Recognition – This talk describes and demonstrates a new approach that adapts the video-occlusion method developed in sport science research laboratories in order to both test and train hitters in the ability of recognizing pitches.

AtomStats Analyzing Baseball Statistics in a New Way – Offering an alternative way to analyze a baseball player’s value and predict the outcome of specific situations based on splits

Interviews with Scott Boras and Jeff Luhnow.

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