I t's that time of year—frozen northern fi elds begin to show a little green as predictions of the upcoming season abound from spring training in the south. As spring leaps forth from the doldrums of winter, America's pastime consumes more of the newspaper sports section. Having grown up in an era when kids spent the most of their summer vacation around baseball diamonds, I watch with interest ...

Advanced statistical measures are increasingly popular in sports, especially baseball. These measures are used for reasons from contract negotiations to roster changes to award determinations. One of the most popular methods of determining a player’s worth in baseball uses WAR: wins above replacement. The methods described herein work to fine-tune the goals of the offensive component of WAR by ...

Sports examples can be wonderful vehicles for teaching OR/MS concepts. Baseball is particularly well suited to teaching statistics/probability, Markov decision processes, and decision analysis. This paper details a baseball example I developed to teach fundamental decision making skills. This example has been used successfully to teach decision making to undergraduates and graduates in technica...

APBA baseball is a sophisticated baseball simulation game. Each major league player is represented by a card, which has numbers on it that reflect his performance in a particular season. Two people play a game by rolling dice and looking on their players’ cards to see what is the outcome of the roll of the dice. In this article, we use Markov chains to analyze certain aspects of this game. For ...

E. Abel andM. Kruger (2005) reported that the median life expectancy of Major League Baseball players after election to the Baseball Hall of Fame is 5 years shorter than that of players of the same age who are not elected to the Hall of Fame. This conclusion is surprising because there is no compelling explanation for such a dramatic reduction in life expectancy. However, the data used in that ...