Request for help on a baseball stats project

by Zeus12888 on Sep 6, 2009 11:24 PM EDT

Hey guys,

Im taking Stats 101 in college right now, and have been tasked with completing a project on statistics. Our professor said we can do a topic in sports, so I was wondering if any of you guys could help me come up with a good question that merited statistical analysis.

Some thoughts I had included:

Is it better to pitch to Albert Pujols with the bases loaded, or walk him?
Does total payroll correlate with winning percentage?
Are you more likely to make an out if you take the first pitch?

Any ideas you guys have would be much appreciated, and if you guys could point me towards a place where I could find some of these statistics, it would also be a big help. Thanks so much, and I promise to share the results of my project when I'm done!

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that third one sounds really interesting, also we joke about it, but see if bunting really does increase/decrease percentages of scoring a run. just a thought

You are *almost*
as amazing as Matt Diaz..
by Titansfan9 on Sep 1, 2009 8:01 PM PDT

(Yunel is still the Queen of Hearts)

by GoBravesNY on Sep 6, 2009 11:29 PM EDT reply actions

Deliberately sac bunting unquestionably does.

by 17843 on Sep 7, 2009 1:05 AM EDT up reply actions

go to beyond the boxscore, they even did a bit on payroll and winning percentage a short while back

by McCann's the Man on Sep 6, 2009 11:39 PM EDT reply actions

Unfortunately, there is so much on the subject (Beyond the Boxscore, The Hardball Times, etc.) that it will be hard to find something completely novel. Definitely it would be interesting to do something situational, like the Pujols idea. Ideally, for that, you would need tons of game data from Retrosheet which can be a bit of a pain to wade through, in my opinion.

The payroll idea is especially well-trodden territory (I remember a particularly interesting study of payroll efficiency in J.C. Bradbury’s Sabernomics). It might be the easiest, however.

However, since your stats teacher probably isn’t into cutting edge baseball research, debunking a common myth like sac bunts one would be somewhat interesting. Other interesting projects off the top of my head:
Using retrosheet data to make a custom fielding metric using putouts
What is the value/efficiency of the draft (i.e. pull a Ross Ohlendorf)
What is value/risk of a stolen base

If you want ideas, you could check SABR’s website for some projects that have won prizes (including a student division)
http://www.sabr.org/sabr.cfm?a=cms,c,134,43,0

by kasas on Sep 7, 2009 9:56 AM EDT reply actions