Okay, so today I decided to dive into something I’ve been thinking about for a while: trying to predict home runs in baseball games. It’s a total crapshoot, I know, but I figured it’d be a fun little project. Here’s how it went down.
First, I needed data. Lots of it. I mean, you can’t predict anything without knowing what’s happened before, right? So I started digging around for stats. I’m talking things like:
- Batter stats: How often does a guy hit homers? What’s his slugging percentage? Stuff like that.
- Pitcher stats: Does this pitcher give up a lot of home runs? What’s his ERA?
- Park factors: Some ballparks are way easier to hit home runs in than others. Gotta account for that.
- Weather: Is it a hot, humid day? The ball might fly further.
I Gath some stats from the free data * data was not perfect.
Once I had a decent pile of data, I started messing around,I use Python, becasue it is a good tool.I started just throwing everything into a model and seeing what stuck.
It was… messy. My first few attempts were pretty terrible. Like, worse-than-random-guessing terrible. But I kept tweaking things. I tried different, changed some parameters, and slowly, very slowly, things started to get a tiny bit better.
The “Aha!” Moment (Sort Of)
I wouldn’t say I had a real “Eureka!” moment. It was more like a “Huh, that’s slightly less awful” moment. I realized that certain factors seemed to matter more than others. For example, a batter’s history of hitting home runs against a particular pitcher seemed to be a surprisingly good indicator. Go figure.
The Result (So Far)
So, where am I at now? Well, I have a model that’s… okay. It’s definitely not going to make me a millionaire betting on baseball games, but it’s better than flipping a coin. I’d say it gets things right maybe 55-60% of the time? Which, honestly, is better than I expected when I started.
I’m still playing around with it. Adding more data, trying different algorithms, all that jazz. It’s a work in progress, for sure. But hey, it’s been a fun little experiment, and I’ve learned a ton along the way. Maybe one day I’ll crack the code, but for now, I’m just enjoying the process.
