TNHP went on vacation last week for Thanksgiving and I'm probably going to put it on hold for a couple more weeks while I finish up school for the term. In the meantime, hopefully this will hold you over.
Rather than my standard discussion+problems, I will do something different today. I will first present [...]

Last week I talked about expectation with a short note at the end about sports and expectation. Whether or not you realize it, expectation is at the heart of every strategic decision that a team makes. If a team signs a big name free agent, it is in an attempt to maximize their [...]

I am going to be gone this evening and so I'm delaying posting of The Nation Has Problems until tomorrow. Also, I haven't written it yet.
Instead, I thought I would pose a different kind of question to The Nation. Ratliff was included in the Garnett trade almost entirely on the basis of expiring [...]

Expectation
One of the most important concepts in sports as well as probability deals with the concept of expectation. Statistics such as ERA or points per game are attempts to use expectation to quantify how good a player or team is. Although these stats aren't perfect, they are based on the concept of expectation.
In [...]

I still remember when it hit me. I was sitting at my computer last season, looking at the Twolves payroll on hoopeshype.com and getting depressed over how terrible it looked. I had a revelation.  It was one of those moments of total clarity.  The Wolves will never win a championship with Garnett. [...]

The Monty Hall Problem
When I first announced that I would be doing this feature on a regular basis, Moss asked me a question about whether a person on the game show "Deal or No Deal" should have switched cases at the very end. I noted that it didn't matter whether or not he decided [...]

I had written an elaborate introduction to probability theory, but my post got to be a little bit long and I wanted to shorten it. It people are interested, I can post it later. For this post, I had a couple of interesting examples and wanted to cut to the chase.
Conditional Probabilities

Often times [...]

The first thing they always did was count you.
We're going to be a bit more sophisticated than the counting you did in high school, but I imagine this will be familiar to a lot of you anyway. A lot of the stuff I write about has to do with discrete, finite probabilities. In [...]

The other day I posted an interesting stats question in the middle of the comments of one of SBG's posts. To be honest, the reason I posted it was because I hadn't solved it yet and I wanted to know the answer. I figured that it didn't really involve any deep theoretical math [...]

I don't normally have special contacts of any kind, but today an inside source sent me some pictures of a Lake Minnetonka property that recently went on the market. Unfortunately, I am not allowed to post these pictures here, but I will give out as much information as I can.
This house is alleged to [...]

Name: GreekHouse
Hometown: Minneapolis, MN (although I was actually born in Fargo, ND)
Town I Currently Live In: Ames, IA
Profession: Math PhD Student
Bats: R
Throws: R
Positions: 1B,3B,DH
Greatest Career Achievement in Baseball/Softball/T-ball: When I was in college, I was nicknamed "The One Man Home Run Derby". When the fence was up on the women's softball [...]

Earlier tonight, I was debating with a friend over the existence of clutch hitting (I was of course arguing against it). I stumbled upon this article, which gives a pretty good argument saying that clutch hitting does indeed exist.  (Note: This article is a few years old.  I'm not sure if anybody has done [...]

Hi, I'm Greek House! You may remember me from such posts as Sharks vs. Piranhas Parts I and II. I am also the author of the best selling book "Guppieball: The Art of Leaving Runners on Base".
The 3rd part of the series deals with what happens when our two teams slump. I [...]

For any of you who have not yet read part I of the story, I recommend reading it first. I won't bother to reintroduct the two teams here, so you will need to at least look at part I before reading this. I had intended to include slumps in part 2, but in [...]

I always find it funny when old timers talk about "small ball" and "doing the little things" as an efficient way to win baseball games. I found it even funnier when Ozzie Guillen used to talk about how his hitters needed to stop hitting so many home runs and start doing better situational hitting--as [...]

SBG: GH introduces himself below, but I wanted to say that I always enjoyed his Timberwolves blog. I'm glad to have him come aboard.
Hi all! I figure I should introduce myself for those of you who aren't familiar with me. I am GH (short for Greek House) of the now defunct [...]