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Within baseball analytics, there is substantial interest in comprehensive statistics intended to capture overall player performance. One such measure is Wins Above Replacement (WAR), which aggregates the contributions of a player in each…
Unlike other major professional sports, American football lacks comprehensive statistical ratings for player evaluation that are both reproducible and easily interpretable in terms of game outcomes. Existing methods for player evaluation in…
Systemic and idiosyncratic patterns in pitching mechanics of 24 top starting pitchers in Major League Baseball (MLB) are extracted and discovered from PITCHf/x database. These evolving patterns across different pitchers or seasons are…
Recent measurement technologies enable us to analyze baseball at higher levels. There are, however, still many unclear points around the pitching strategy. The two elements make it difficult to measure the effect of pitching strategy.…
In most popular sports leagues, like the MLB, NBA, and NFL, none of the commonly used statistics take into account the strengths of the opponents a player faces. One of the main reasons for this is the conventional belief that a player's…
Batting average is one of the principle performance measures for an individual baseball player. It is natural to statistically model this as a binomial-variable proportion, with a given (observed) number of qualifying attempts (called…
The field of quantitative analytics has transformed the world of sports over the last decade. To date, these analytic approaches are statistical at their core, characterizing what is and what was, while using this information to drive…
In the high-stakes world of baseball, every nuance of a pitcher's mechanics holds the key to maximizing performance and minimizing runs. Traditional analysis methods often rely on pre-recorded offline numerical data, hindering their…
The baseball game is often seen as many contests that are performed between individuals. The duel between the pitcher and the batter, for example, is considered the engine that drives the sport. The pitchers use a variety of strategies to…
We develop the SEAM (synthetic estimated average matchup) method for describing batter versus pitcher matchups in baseball. We first estimate the distribution of balls put into play by a batter facing a pitcher, called the empirical spray…
Runs Batted IN (RBI) records the number of runs a hitter directly drives in during their plate appearances and reflects a batter's ability to convert opportunities into scoring. Because producing runs determines game outcomes, RBI has long…
Numerous statistics have been proposed for the measure of offensive ability in major league baseball. While some of these measures may offer moderate predictive power in certain situations, it is unclear which simple offensive metrics are…
A popular quantitative approach to evaluating player performance in sports involves comparing an observed outcome to the expected outcome ignoring player involvement, which is estimated using statistical or machine learning methods. In…
Since the advent of high-resolution pitch tracking data (PITCHf/x), many in the sabermetrics community have attempted to quantify a Major League Baseball catcher's ability to "frame" a pitch (i.e. increase the chance that a pitch is called…
In baseball, every play on the field is quantitatively evaluated and has an effect on individual and team strategies. The weighted on base average (wOBA) is well known as a measure of an batter's hitting contribution. However, this measure…
Major League Baseball (MLB) has a storied history of using statistics to better understand and discuss the game of baseball, with an entire discipline of statistics dedicated to the craft, known as sabermetrics. At their core, all…
Predicting batting averages for specific batters against specific pitchers is a challenging problem in baseball. Previous methods for estimating batting averages in these matchups have used regression models that can incorporate the…
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have exhibited state-of-the-art performance across wide-range of domains such as recommender systems, material design, and drug repurposing. Yet message-passing GNNs suffer from over-squashing -- exponential…
Statistical analysis is a major aspect of baseball, from player averages to historical benchmarks and records. Much of baseball fanfare is based around players exceeding the norm, some in a single game and others over a long career. Career…
We have developed a sophisticated statistical model for predicting the hitting performance of Major League baseball players. The Bayesian paradigm provides a principled method for balancing past performance with crucial covariates, such as…