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Activity Number:
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395
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Type:
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Invited
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Date/Time:
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Wednesday, August 5, 2009 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
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Sponsor:
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Section on Statistical Computing
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| Abstract - #302745 |
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Title:
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Shrinkage in the Evaluation of Fielding in Major League Baseball
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Author(s):
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Shane Jensen*+ and Kenneth Shirley and Abraham Wyner
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Companies:
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The Wharton School and Columbia University and The Wharton School
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Address:
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University of Pennsylvania, Department of Statistics, , PA, ,
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Keywords:
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Hierarchical models ; Shrinkage ; Baseball ; Spatial ; Logistic regression ; Fielding
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Abstract:
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The use of statistical modeling in baseball has received substantial attention recently in both the media and academic community. Our focus is on a relatively under-explored topic: the quantitative analysis of fielding. We implement spatial models on high-resolution ball-in-play data in order to evaluate the performance of individual fielders. A key issue is the balance between the personal performance of an individual fielder and the shrinkage to the population performance of similar fielders. We combine our spatial modeling with a hierarchical Bayesian structure in order to impose shrinkage on the performance of individual fielders while sharing information between fielders at each position. We present results across four seasons of MLB data (2002--2005) and compare our approach to other fielding evaluation procedures.
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