Daily Orange: Beyond the box score—SU club uses statistics to further baseball knowledge

There’s a newhouse for number-crunchers at my alma mater Syracuse, as welcoming as a Whitman sampler and good to the last Maxwell drop:

Over the past few months, the club gave a presentation at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the largest conferences in the sports analytics field. Their work was also featured in ESPN The Magazine in July.

During the 2013–14 academic year, the club worked to come up with a topic to cover in hopes of being able to attend the conference. With tough deadlines to make, a lot of coordinating via email and plans being formed over winter break, the team came up with the idea to present research on the effects of atmospheric conditions on pitch selection, said sport management professor Rodney Paul, the club’s advisor.

The work done by the club at SU was selected as one of fifteen papers to be on display at the conference this past March and club president Matt Filippi was able to travel to Boston to represent the team’s work.

“It would be a great experience for any sports fan,” said Filippi as he described his time at the conference. He added that the success of the club was due to the members’ passionate efforts toward the conference.