Predicting the playing character of cricket pitches
First, apologies for the lack of posting over the past couple months. I’m in the midst of a busy semester of university, so I haven’t been able to dedicate much time to cricket analysis. But I wanted to share an interesting paper I came across, by James, Carré, and Haake. They build a Newtonian model of what happens when a cricket ball bounces on a pitch. It turns out that the “pace” of a pitch (ie, what percent of velocity a ball retains after bouncing) can be predicted fairly well by this model, which uses some physical pitch measurements as parameters.
You can find the abstract of this paper at: http://www.springerlink.com/content/g551516250368338/. Full-text can probably be found through an institutional subscription, if you are affiliated with such an institution.
