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Activity Number: 487
Type: Contributed
Date/Time: Wednesday, August 12, 2015 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
Sponsor: Section on Statistics in Sports
Abstract #317569
Title: Major League Baseball Free Agent Fits: Examining Production Output Distributions Through Simulation
Author(s): Pamela Badian-Pessot* and Daniel Aucoin and Austin Champagne
Companies: Smith College and University of Massachusetts Amherst and University of Massachusetts Amherst
Keywords:
Abstract:

Every offseason, Major League Baseball has hundreds of players who are not contracted by a team for the upcoming season. These players, known as free agents, are in an open market where any team can offer them a contract in exchange for the player's services. Last year, the contracts given to free agents in the open market ranged anywhere from $500,000 to $240,000,000 in guaranteed money. Given the massive range of dollar amounts offered to different free agents in the current market, it is imperative for teams to accurately evaluate just how much money every free agent is worth to them. Based on 2015 Steamer player projections, we fit a multinomial distribution to model team production with and without possible free agent signees. Our model provides a dynamic visualization of the distribution of outcomes for team production, rather than the predominantly used point estimate. The results from our model can better identify the optimal free agent acquisitions for each team in the upcoming season.


Authors who are presenting talks have a * after their name.

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