Estimating Fielding Ability in Baseball Players Over Time
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James Piette
Abstract
Quantitative evaluation of fielding ability in baseball has been an ongoing challenge for statisticians. Detailed recording of ball-in-play data in recent years has spurred the development of sophisticated fielding models. Foremost among these approaches, Jensen et al. (2009) used a hierarchical Bayesian model to estimate spatial fielding curves for individual players. These previous efforts have not addressed evolution in a player’s fielding ability over time. We expand the work of Jensen et al. (2009) to model the fielding ability of individual players over multiple seasons. Several different models are implemented and compared via posterior predictive validation on hold-out data. Among our choices, we find that a model which imposes shrinkage towards an age-specific average gives the best performance. Our temporal models allow us to delineate the performance of a fielder on a season-to-season basis versus their entire career.
©2012 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Article
- Models for Third Down Conversion in the National Football League
- A Comparison of the Autocorrelation and Variance of NFL Team Strengths Over Time using a Bayesian State-Space Model
- The Sensitivity of College Football Rankings to Several Modeling Choices
- The Individual Factors of Successful Free Throw Shooting
- New Insights on the Tendency of NCAA Basketball Officials to Even Out Foul Calls
- Was There a Structural Break in Barry Bonds's Bat?
- Estimating Fielding Ability in Baseball Players Over Time
- Adjusted Plus-Minus for NHL Players using Ridge Regression with Goals, Shots, Fenwick, and Corsi
- An Analysis of Curling Strategy
