The Game Theory of Baseball

Baseball has always been a game of numbers. Fans of the game have grown up being able to recite them by heart; Ted Williams’.406 batting average, Joe DiMaggio’s 56 game hitting streak, Babe Ruth’s 714 home runs. These numbers hold a special place in the history of the game. Statistics such as batting average, wins, home runs, and runs batted in have always been there to tell us who the best players are. Your favorite player has a .300 batting average? He’s an all-star. He hit 40 home runs and batted in 120 runs? That’s a Most Valuable Player Award candidate. Your favorite team’s best pitcher won 20 games? He’s a Cy Young Award contender. These statistics have been used to evaluate player performance

Out of all the vast variety of sports there are, baseball is the most challenging and difficult sport to play. No other sport compares to the degree of difficulty that you have to deal with, like you do in playing the game of baseball. There are so many different elements that make this game the most difficult. Three major elements stick out in my mind as to why this wonderful sport is the toughest of all. The three main factors in my mind are the increased physical and hand eye coordination component, the mental aspect of this game, and the human interdependence between umpires, which are a vital part in every play.

The book Moneyball by Michael Lewis is about a former major league baseball player who became the manager of the Oakland A’s. It tells the story of how he led the team to success despite their low budget by using computer based analytics to draft players. With the help of Bill James, the Oakland A’s came up with a new plan based on statistics to draft players. He went after players nobody wanted due to their low budget and his new plan. Billy led the Oakland Athletics to a successive win seasons by changing the way he measured players. He abandoned the traditional 5 “tool” the other scouts used and adopted empirical analytics. The abandonment of the traditional assessment of

Baseball statistics are meant to be a representation of a player’s talent. Since baseball’s inception around the mid-19th century, statistics have been used to interpret the talent level of any given player, however, the statistics that have been traditionally used to define talent are often times misleading. At a fundamental level, baseball, like any game, is about winning. To win games, teams have to score runs; to score runs, players have to get on base any way they can. All the while, the pitcher and the defense are supposed to prevent runs from scoring. As simplistic as this view sounds, the statistics being used to evaluate individual players were extremely flawed. In an attempt to develop more

​ Baseball to most it just a simple game that involves one just throwing a ball, another hitting it, and then another catching it, but it’s much more than that. The ability to hit a baseball three hundred plus feet, that’s coming at you at speeds greater than 85 mph, is hard to attain. Now imagine trying to catch a ball that’s coming at the same speeds, not so easy now right? Apart from the physical abilities needed to play, the mental part of the game is also important. The game of baseball is similar to life if you’re not prepared physically and mentally to go about your business you won’t succeed.

“I don’t try to hit home runs. That’s not my game,” Rivera, who leads the team with six home runs, said. “He just threw me a changeup up and I hit it.”

The game of baseball has been around for approximately 150 years and throughout its history there have been different genres used to discuss or write about the sport. The two genres are a blog post and a news article about win-loss projections for teams. Each genre will look at the sport and write about the projections in a different way because they have different authors, audiences, and purposes. The two different genres will also differ in the style and context because they have different reasons and goals for their writings. The blog post will attempt to prove how the preseason predictions made by the news article are unreliable. On the other hand, the news article will attempt to show how the predictions are still trustworthy. The genres

In baseball a common factor for determining the quality of a player is batting average. (# of hits/# of bats) This statistic helps to show a player's ability to successfully make contact with the ball, which leads to RBI’s (runs batted

Qualitative research plays a huge role in this article because of Rizzo’s decision making this season. This method explains Rizzo’s decision and makes him look a little better than the people persuaded him. He did this simply for security for the future, which makes total sense but most fans live for the now and professional baseball managers have to worry about winning now, but also later in the future and in the nationals situation setting an inning limit on Strasburg was the smart thing to do.

Batting average was the norm adopted by other baseball teams. But training for Oakland was focused on the player’s ability to obtain on-base scoring. The team relied more on selecting players by their on-base percentages. According to Sabermetrics model, teams always win with players having attained high on-base percentages.

The Artificial Neural Networks(ANNs) is slowly a burgeon tool that is highly utilize in the Major League Baseball organization. Additionally, this sport has data that is significant for the domain. The domain includes 30,000 players evaluated to narrow it down to around 250 players, so the

Major League Baseball is known as “America’s Pastime”. The human element in the game makes it exciting and unpredictable. Baseball remains, as it should, as an un-digitalized and an untimed sport. In 2014, Major League Baseball expanded the instant replay allowed challenges from solely home-run challenges, to almost everything, excluding only the calls on balls and strikes. Fans’ request was one of the reasons this was done. Another reason was there had been a handful of bad calls by umpires, which prompted the expansion of instant replay allowed challenges. Additionally, some thought it would make the game more interesting to watch by trying to limit the amount of incorrect calls by umpires. However, there are some flaws in the

While we’re on the subject of the card formula, having a hitter or pitcher with good walk/control numbers makes a world of difference in this game. Jean Segura and Starlin Castro have extremely low walk rates for hitters. They may have 1 or 2 BB units added to their columns. Sometimes they will have 0 BB units. That’s the projection for the upcoming cards. Segura is a 30/26 OB card projection with 0 BB units. Let’s assume he had 7 BB units, which is around normal these days, and then Segura is a 37/33 OB card

With the advent of technology in baseball expanding with instant replay and newfound statistics to measure player success the MLB and their respective clubs are trying to find new ways to answer the question: How do measure one players worth from another? Is there one statistic by which we can measure performance or player worth across a specific league? There is a strong idea in baseball today that with Sabermetrics someone can only be held responsible if what they make a difference to their team (WAR: It Works | FanGraphs Baseball."). There are two specific ways to judge the extent to which a person made a difference to their team. The first way is to make an action-based contrast and compare the actual action a person took with alternative actions she could have taken (Gerstenberg). In the following modeling experiment the researcher will attempt to answer these questions and model the Sabermetrics, Wins Above Replacement, statistic to measure its effectiveness and compare to its monetary worth. This theoretical model of sabermetrics will give insight to how teams prepare for a players injury, a player who leaves the team or leaves via Free Agency and which players are underperforming.

Determining the relative value for each player is a major component of DFS. The decision-making that goes along with setting a lineup with these stipulations is a perfect example of microeconomics and is comparable to the concept of sabermetrics in baseball.