There are not many times that I would report on a math conference here.  For that matter, there aren't too many times when anybody would report on any math conference on any sports blog.  However, this is no ordinary sports blog and this is no ordinary conference.  I didn't have any strict agenda for this conference, which meant that I could pretty much do whatever I wanted.  This meant attending talks on such things as pop-up books, checkers, and knitting, among other things (don't worry, I also attended talks about "real" math while I was there, too)

Of course I was thrilled to find out that today, as well as tomorrow morning, there was a special session on sports math.  Other than judging the undergraduate poster session (which was the only real thing I had to do) and going to one other talk, I pretty much spent my entire afternoon there.  It started out with a very good talk entitled "Are Umpires Racist?"  Since none of you were there, I'll spoil it for you.  The short answer is "not in general, but there might be a few who are."

There was one talk, however, that really stood out above the rest.  It was given by Ben Baumer who previously worked for the Mets, but has since left to become a professor at Smith College.  The talk was about openWAR--an open source statistical package for baseball.  He started by discussing what WAR is, as well as what a replacement level player is.  WAR is somewhat ambiguous and replacement level is pretty much undefined.  He suggested that for replacement level players, we should take out the 750 players in baseball who have played the most, and then aggregate the rest.

There were many other interesting things he discussed, but I won't go into too much detail.  You can see the abstract here, and the slides for a slightly different version of the talk here.

After the talk, there was a group surrounding him and he seemed to be talking to one other person in particular, so I nudged my way into the circle.  I had to leave before it was over, but later found out the guy he was talking to was the creator of baseball-reference.com!  Aren't math conferences fun?