ESPN.com's Bradford Doolittle writes that the circumstantial evidence for Jose Urena's innocence is not great, regarding his beaning of Ronald Acuna:
"Urena's 25 hit batters since last season are tied for the most in the majors with Cole Hamels and Charlie Morton. According to TruMedia research, his 17 hit batsmen since 2016 on fastballs are tied for the most in baseball."
Full article: ESPN.com
Read MoreWhat might the perfect fantasy football draft look like? Neil Greenberg uses TruMedia data to figure it out:
"For example, LeSean McCoy is the No. 1 back in Buffalo, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be plenty of opportunities for his primary backup, Chris Ivory, to get carries. Last season McCoy’s backups accounted for 25 percent of all carries but also 49 percent of the team’s carries in goal-to-go situations, per data from TruMedia."
Full article: Washington Post
Read MoreNeil Greenberg uses TruMedia data and heat maps to show how good teenager Juan Soto has been this season:
"When Soto isn’t taking a free pass to first, he’s crushing balls: Soto is batting .367 with a 1.215 OPS against four-seam fastballs, sinkers and cutters, the highest OPS among batters who have seen at least 650 fastballs in 2018, per data from TruMedia. It doesn’t matter if the pitch is inside, outside, high or low — Soto finds a way to muscle it out of the park."
Full article: Washington Post
Read MoreUsing ProVision to preview the big game of the Premier League's opening weekend by analyzing sequence data for Arsenal and Manchester City:
"City averaged 5.3 passes per sequence last season, which may not sound impressive but was 26% better than the second-best Premier League team, which was Arsenal at 4.2 passes per sequence. This gap is about the same as the difference between Arsenal and Southampton, who ranked seventh in this metric and narrowly avoided relegation.."
Full article: OptaPro blog
Read MoreFor ESPN.com, Bradford Doolittle looks at Mike Trout's low RBI total and whether or not the pitches he sees are a factor...
"According to TruMedia, since the beginning of the 2016 season, 46.7 percent of the pitches Trout has seen with runners on base have been in the strike zone. That's lower than the league average (47.6 percent) but not shockingly low. There have been 103 hitters to see an even lower frequency of strikes in those spots."
Full article: ESPN.com
Read MoreFor the Washington Post's Fancy Stats blog, Neil Greenberg used TruMedia's heat maps to show the extra strike calls that Wilson Ramos' framing provides:
"Ramos also gives the Phillies another catcher who can frame pitches. With Knapp behind the plate, Philadelphia’s pitchers get a called strike on pitches out of the zone 5.4 percent of the time, per TruMedia; Ramos has a 7.2 percent called-strike rate on those pitches, just slightly lower than Alfaro (7.8 percent). The league average is 7.2 percent."
Full article: Washington Post
Read MoreTruMedia CTO Jeff Stern discusses defensive metrics with the Boston Red Sox' J.D. Martinez and The Boston Globe.
“The 40-minute conversation between Martinez and Stern was illuminating in trying to assess Martinez’s defense on an individual level and in understanding the evolution of modern defensive statistics — and whether those numbers seen by the public are the same as those used by teams or analysts such as the TruMedia team.”
Full article: The Boston Globe
Read MoreThis SI.com article goes beyond the box score to examine how France's N'Golo Kante and Croatia's Luka Modric powered their teams to the World Cup final.
"[Modric] does defensive work, as he’s tied with Kante for most recoveries at this World Cup (48), and no player has won possession more times in the middle third of the field (31).
Modric is also the offensive talisman, with 16 chances created, double the total of any teammate."
Full article: SI.com (by Paul Carr, TruMedia Director of Content Development)
Read MoreFor FiveThirtyEight, TruMedia's Albert Larcada analyzed how waiting time affects penalty conversion, revealing that longer delay appear to increase the likelihood of a miss.
"The success rate of penalties with a wait time of less than 150 seconds is 76 percent, while the success rate of penalties with a wait time of greater than 150 seconds is 73 percent. With the relatively large sample of penalties we have, the difference is statistically significant."
Full article: FiveThirtyEight (by Albert Larcada, Director of Analytics)
Read MoreThe Washington Post's Neil Greenberg wonders if the time has come to bring back the bunt.
"According to data from TruMedia, there were 232 bunt singles last year from March to June, the lowest since 2008, the first year data is available. This season there were 226.
But it might be time to bring the bunt back, especially with more and more teams employing the shift to neutralize the league's most-predictable hitters."
Full article: ChicagoTribune.com (via Washington Post)
Read More"Possession hasn’t necessarily been helpful here in Russia. According to TruMedia Networks, the top six teams in average possession at this World Cup already have gone home. Interestingly, Croatia, England, France and Belgium rank 7th through 10th, respectively. Uruguay, the CONMEBOL side that held the ball the least, still stands 19th overall. Four years ago, Germany finished second in the possession standings at 60%, but none of the other semifinalists were in the top eight."
Full article: Sports Illustrated
Read MoreTruMedia provided data to The Washington Post for this article and visualization on Benjamin Pavard's stunning strike against Argentina.
"...the shot had an “expected goals” of just 0.03, meaning it would be expected to produce a goal three percent of the time. This figure is calculated from 10 different variables, but the two most significant for this particular shot are pretty straightforward. It was taken from 22 meters away from the goal line – pretty far out. And it was taken from 15 meters off the center line – a very bad angle."
Full article: Washington Post
Read MoreTruMedia's Paul Carr wrote a Sports Illustrated piece with a stat and graphic for each of the World Cup quarterfinalists. The article highlighted contributions by Romelu Lukaku, Neymar and Luka Modric, along with potential issues for Russia and England.
"Despite playing four games, England ranks 22nd in the tournament with 23 shots from open play and 17th with 2.22 expected goals from open play. Only three of those shots were worth at least 0.2 xG each, which is about double the average shot quality."
Full article: Sports Illustrated (by Paul Carr, Director of Content Development)
Read MoreFor the Washington Post, Albert Larcada wrote on how Mexico's young stars shined in the first two group games.
"Perhaps the biggest name of Mexico’s under-23 contingent, [Hirving] Lozano put in a performance against Germany that ranks among the best in recent World Cups. Here is the full list of players over the past six World Cups with a goal, an assist and a pass-completion rate of better than 90 percent in their team’s first two matches: Lionel Messi (2006) and Lozano. That’s it."
Full article: Washington Post (by Albert Larcada, Director of Analytics)
Read MoreThree-time Cy Young winner Max Scherzer relies on TruMedia's baseball analytics platform as part of his exhaustive preparation process.
"...instead of watching film of opposing hitters like pitchers tend to do, [Scherzer] pulled up an analytically driven website called TruMedia. He proceeded to pore over a series of numbers and heat maps, comparing the 2018 version of himself to the 2017 version who won a second straight Cy Young award."
Full article: ESPN.com
Read MoreThe Washington Post's Neil Greenberg uses TruMedia's baseball platform as he says Mike Trout's season is comparable to Ruth, Mays, Williams and Mantle.
"Trout has always been productive at the plate — his career OPS heading into this season was .976 — but improved plate discipline has helped him find another level of efficiency. He is chasing a career-low 18 percent of pitches out of the strike zone while making contact on a career-high 90 percent of pitches in the strike zone. ...
Trout mashes off-speed pitches, too. According to data from TruMedia, he is hitting .414 with a 1.554 OPS against change-ups and splitters with five of his 23 home runs coming off those offerings. Curveballs have been an issue in terms of power, but that, too, is relative. His .600 slugging percentage against that pitch is strong despite having just one home run against curves this year."
Full article: Washington Post
Read MoreFor Sports Illustrated, Paul Carr examines how Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo fared at previous World Cups.
"At the 2006 World Cup, Ronaldo was far more active in the midfield, both offensively and defensively. He went one-on-one 37 times and had 36 recoveries of the ball in 484 minutes. Four years later, he had 21 one-on-ones and 11 recoveries in 360 minutes. In 2014, those numbers dipped to 12 one-on-ones and four recoveries in 270 minutes.
This is because Ronaldo has evolved into more of a true forward than a winger. He sent in 21 crosses in 2006, and a total of 14 in 2010 and 2014. In Brazil, 35 percent of his touches were in the center third of the field (as opposed to the left or right thirds), up from 28 percent in 2010 and 18 percent in 2006."
Full article: Sports Illustrated (by Paul Carr, Director of Content Development)
Read MoreWriting for the OptaPro blog, Paul Carr uses TruMedia's ProVision tool (developed in partnership with Opta) to show how a newly-promoted Premier League club might use data while searching for a left-sided attacker.
"To narrow the pool of candidates, the search is limited to the just-completed European league seasons for players:
- From the Dutch Eredivisie, Belgium’s Jupiler League, Ligue 2, 2. Bundesliga and England’s Championship
- Who played as a left midfielder, left attacking midfielder, left winger or left wing back
- With at least 900 minutes this season
- Currently age 30 or younger
- Who are right-footed or use both feet equally well
That leaves 73 players on our target list, with the four selected statistics (expected goals, expected assists, defensive actions in each half of the field) scaled on a per-90-minute basis."
Full article: OptaPro blog (by Paul Carr, Director of Content Development)
Read MoreThe Washington Post's Neil Greenberg uses TruMedia's baseball platform to support his claim that Max Scherzer is the best pitcher in baseball.
"According to data from TruMedia, Scherzer averages 92.7 mph with his fastball and, when he throws it in the upper third of the plate, opposing batters swing and miss a career-high 39 percent of the time. Overall, hitters are putting the pitch in play less than a quarter of the time it is thrown (24 percent), making it difficult for batters to get good wood on the ball.
His slider, used almost exclusively against right-handed batters, is thrown in the strike zone 57 percent of the time yet is a called strike half the time. In other words, the pitch is completely baffling hitters."
Full article: Washington Post
Read MorePhillies prospect Scott Kingery may be snapping out of his slump, as SB Nation blog The Good Phight explains, using TruMedia imagery…
“First, let’s set the baseline. For the first three weeks in May, Kingery continued to struggle to put a good bat on the ball. Just look at the spray chart.
There is exactly ONE ball that made it into left field for three weeks, and that came on May 19 against St. Louis, near the tail end of that stretch. Every single other ball on the left side of the infield was a grounder, save for one pop-up just to the left of second base. There was just no good contact whatsoever.
In the last six games, however, Kingery has already had five line drives off the bat; one more than he had in the previous three weeks.
Not swinging and missing at pitches over the plate has helped. He’s probably still leaking and reaching over the plate a bit too much, but at least the empty flails haven’t been as prevalent.”
Full article: SB Nation
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