Duke Baseball Analytics team is looking to create a metric called Pitcher WAR. This metric is widely used throughout Major League Baseball to evaluate talent and use as evidence during contract negotiations. WAR stands for Wins Above Replacement, which allows you to see what the value of each player is through a “win” total for all players. At the college level, this becomes more challenging due to the differentiation in talent levels across Division 1, 2, and 3 baseball. In order to create an accurate metric, you must assign weights to each player depending on the conference they play in. For example, a Duke baseball pitcher who finished the season with a 3.50 ERA across 50 innings pitched would have a higher WAR than a Binghamton University pitcher who finished the season with the same stats, simply because of the talent level they are both going up against on a day-to-day basis. The best way to do this is to separate the conferences into tiers. We are only going with Pitcher WAR for right now because in order to calculate the WAR for a hitter, you need baserunning and defensive metrics, which we do not currently have. This Pitcher WAR will be vital in our evaluation of not only our own players and potential lineup combinations, but also for the evaluation of players we are potentially bringing in through the transfer portal.
Students will be using data gathered by the NCAA from our Trackman and TruMedia networks. There will be some data cleaning involved initially, the students will have to create tiers for each of the conferences in Division 1 college baseball. Once they have the tiers the students will have to calculate how each player did against each conference tier. Once that is completed the students will have to create a park factor metric which adjusts for how each stadium in college baseball plays for that individual players performance. Once this is done the students will have to calculate a “replacement rate”, which will use the middle tier for conferences to decide who is “above replacement” in terms of WAR. This will all be done in R and will eventually create a Wins Above Replacement “WAR” metric for each pitcher in college baseball.
Project Lead: Sean Coveny
Project Manager: Ali Zare
