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november 07, 2004
Spelteori och baseball
Inte för att jag är någon speciell kännare av baseball, men i alla fall.
New York Times: Game Theory Posits Measure of Baseball Players' Value:
Thresherman's Bakehouse, a coffee shop in Melbourne, Australia, would seem an odd spot for a baseball epiphany. Yet it was over down-under joe that Brian Lonergan, a young economist from Yale, and Ben Polak, his former dissertation adviser, took a bite out of the eternal apple of baseball statistics: determining a season's most valuable player.
Traditional categories like home runs and on-base percentage are nice, but they represent mere guesses as to how a player's long balls, walks and what-not help his team win. The two game theorists decided several years ago that what the game needed was a system that acknowledged each player's fundamental charge: to do something, large or small and dependent on the situation, to increase his team's probability of winning.
So they built it, and now own the most sophisticated method around to measure, among other things, the rightful winners of the 2004 postseason awards, which will be announced starting this week.
...
The method's logic is actually very simple: every confrontation between pitcher and batter affects, however marginally, each team's chances of winning. With various numbers of outs and men on base, a double or a strikeout or even a runner-advancing grounder either adds or subtracts a specific amount from the inning's run-scoring potential. Depending on the game's inning and score, each of those amounts takes on varying significance to the final outcome.
"It's just our way of looking at the world from studying game theory," Lonergan said. "Each team starts the game with even probability, and ends at either 0 or 1. In between, you're looking at what the players are doing for their team."
Se även
Business Week Online: What's a Ball Player Worth?
Benjamin Polak
Posted by hakank at november 7, 2004 06:52 FM Posted to Spelteori och ekonomi