The World Series of Data: Analyzing College Baseball Players on the Way to the Major Leagues
Rev. Humbert Kilanowski, O.P.
Baseball has always been a sport that pays great attention to statistics. Yet now more than ever, Major League Baseball teams are relying on data analytics to operate, on every level from in-game strategy to player recruiting and development. As professional teams seek out talented players from the collegiate ranks, it becomes important to evaluate the players objectively. We seek to build a metric that summarizes a player’s overall contributions to the game, based on how his actions on the field (batting, pitching, base running, and fielding) affect his team’s probability of scoring runs. By analyzing the data of the Cape Cod Baseball League, a prestigious summer league for college players, we construct a model, based in linear weights for each event, that evaluates each player’s contributions with a single number. We then refine and test this model by comparing a player’s performance in the Cape League to that in the Majors.
Fr. Humbert Kilanowski, O.P. is a Catholic priest of the Dominican Order, and an assistant professor of mathematics at Providence College. Hailing from Columbus, Ohio, and born and raised in Connecticut, Father Humbert did his undergraduate studies at Case Western Reserve University and earned a doctorate at The Ohio State University. He then joined the Order of Preachers, where he earned a Licentiate in Sacred Theology and was ordained a priest in 2018. That same year, he joined the faculty at Providence and became a member of the Society for American Baseball Research.
