Decision-making in Baseball
Baseball is a great game to analyze from game theory perspective because of the scale of strategic decisions that are continuously made on the fields and each play. In every play, there are various players (baseball players, coaches, team managers and owners) with different goals and payoffs, and thousands of pitch-by-pitch decisions are made in course of an at-bat, inning, game, and season. Major League Baseball, one of the four major professional sports leagues of North America, is the most suitable platform for analysis because statistical information is tracked for almost every single complexion of the game. In the following paper, we choose to inspect one at-bat decision of a single game in detail as a microcosm of the strategies occurring in daily baseball.
Background
Major League Baseball is the highest level of play in North American professional baseball. The regular season includes 162 games for each team and is concluded by advancing five teams from each league (American League and National League) to the "postseason", or play-off, where the winner is laurelled after the World Series. The Tigers/ Red Sox game (American League Champion Series Game 2) on October 13, 2013 is chosen to be analyzed in details by applying game theory.
The winner of ALCS (win 4 out of 7 games) will go to the World Series. Tigers have been into World Series for 12 times and Red Sox, 11 times since 1901. As attending World Series is one of the most honorable for players, managers, and even fans, every decision in every play in every game in play-off would be much more important than in regular season.
October 18, 2013: ALCS #2
Tigers' pitcher didn't allow a hit until the sixth and left after seven wi...
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...e are able to see the importance of minimizing predictability and employing mixed strategies, especially for pitcher. Batters and pitchers must utilize mixed strategies to keep their opponent from anticipating their moves and taking advantage of their tendencies.
Reference
i. Sports Reference LLC, Baseball Reference.com, http://www.baseball-reference.com/
ii. Jim Caple, 2013, ESPN.com, Retrieved from http://espn.go.com/mlb/playoffs/2013/story/_/id/9822450/jim-leyland-curious -decisions-opened-door-red-sox-comeback-mlb
iii. Prospectus Entertainment Ventures, LLC, Baseball Prospectus, http://www.baseballprospectus.com/glossary/index.php?search=RAA
iv. FanGraphs, http://www.fangraphs.com
v. Jerry Crasnick, 2013, ESPN.com, Retrieved from http://espn.go.com/mlb/playoffs/2013/story/_/id/9822513/detroit-tigers-figure -how-regroup-game-3-mlb
Baseball has been of the longest living sports in our world today. The game started with the idea of a stick and ball and now has become one of the most complex sports known in our society. Several rules and regulations have been added to help enhance the game for everyone. Although baseball has endured several issues during its history and development of the game the game has still been a success throughout the world.
World Series Overview | MLB.com: History. (n.d.). Major League Baseball. Retrieved January 21, 2014, from http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/history/postseason/mlb_ws.jsp?feature=club_champs
As previously mentioned, Paul DePodesta, an analyst from the Oakland Athletics, was on the foreground of this type of analysis in the MLB. His discovery of the correlation between winning percentage and team revenues was just the starting point. His methodology of model building was briefly touched on before, but it started with running regression analysis on a series of different typical baseball statistics, and continued with his finding of On Base Percentage and Slugging Percentage being the stats that correlated closest to winning percentage, and the implementation of the AVM systems models outputting a player’s expected run values. MLB’s regression analysis on a player’s MRP for a team is some of the most sophisticated in professional sports, with other leagues and teams starting to catch on and attempting to create their own models of MRP for their respective leagues. By taking the labor market theory and MRP of players and analyzing how they interact with wage determination and competitive balance mechanisms, we can make an economic analysis of the labor market inefficiencies.
Nemee, David. “100 Years of Major League Baseball.” Lincolnwood, Illinois: Publications Infernational, Ltd, 200. Print.
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