Out of Left Field: Academic baseball

Well, we’ve found ourselves in the weird spot between the season ending and the free agency hot stove still heating up. Without much going on in the world of Major League Baseball, this column is focused on baseball at the more academic level, and in particular, a baseball analysis competition. On Nov. 18, the Baseball Analysis at Tufts (BAT) club sent five students to compete in the annual Diamond Dollars Case Competition at Columbia University. Judges at the competition included former Red Sox General Manager Ben Cherington, former Tufts visiting lecturer Andy Andres and various front office analysts. Tufts' team consisted of senior Derek Shin, juniors Matt Carlin and Julia Prusaczyk, first-year Cole Witaszek and myself. The prompt this year was to rank the three most valuable position players in baseball. This valuation took into consideration both a player’s performance and how much they are owed by their team, hence an all-encompassing player “value."

We projected out the performance of every player using Tom Tango's Marcel the Monkey Forecasting System, Marcel as in the monkey from Friends. This system projects performance as a function of the player’s previous performance, with the most recent years weighted more heavily. We then came up with five comparable players for our top five projected players using their statistics, both standard and advanced, through their current age, season, position and skill set. We looked at each of the comparable player’s performances during the years the reference player is under contract and calculated their percent change in wins above replacement (WAR) for each year. To get a final projection, we averaged the Marcel projections with the projections made using the comparable players.

When we looked at our projections, our top five players by WAR to the end of their contracts were Boston Red Sox Right Fielder Mookie Betts, Anaheim Angels Center Fielder Mike Trout, Los Angeles Dodgers Shortstop Corey Seager, Chicago Cubs Third Basemen and Outfielder Kris Bryant and Cleveland Indians Shortstop Francisco Lindor, all young superstars with mostly team-friendly contracts.

The next step was to find out how much money they were owed over their contract and for arbitration eligible players, project out their money earned during those years. Once we had their total projected money earned, we had our two variables that accounted for value. To assign a monetary value to a player’s WAR, we multiplied each win added by $7 million, a pretty standard estimate of dollar per win, and adjusted for a five percent inflation rate, adding monetary value to the team. We then subtracted their money earned during their contract from that and ended up with our deciding factor, total surplus value. In order, our three most valuable players in baseball are Lindor, Seager and Bryant, all adding over $200 million worth of surplus value to their teams.

Competitions like this are held biannually and draw in dozens of college teams from across the country. They provide a unique opportunity to think like a baseball executive and over 30 participants have earned internships and jobs with major league teams, including a few Tufts students. To any readers interested in this aspect of baseball, please feel free to contact me.