Comparing baseball greats across eras, who comes out on top?

An interdisciplinary study co-written by researchers from the Statistics and History Departments of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign presents a new statistical framework to compare baseball players to different eras.

The newspaper, entitled “Comparison of baseball players through eras via the Full House Modeling novel”, appears in Annals of applied statistics And offers significant progression in the way the historical performance of players are included and evaluated.

The research team includes the postdoctoral researcher Shen Yan, the teachers Christopher Kinson and Daniel Eck of the Department of Statistics, and Professor Adrian Burgos Jr. of the History Department. Their work deals with debates that tend to overvalue players from the previous eras of baseball. To do this, the authors created Full House models that adjust players’ metrics by balancing the performance relating to a season against the size and quality of the talent swimming pool at the time.

The team’s conclusions indicate that players like Barry Bond and Willie Mays are reaching the summit, going beyond the Henry “Hank” legends Aaron and Babe Ruth as a big strikers, while Roger Clemens, Greg Maddux and Randy Johnson rank like the best Era-Ajusté launchers. These results arise from the fact that today players compete in much larger and more competitive talent basins.

Research is part of a broader initiative of ECK Sports Lab, whose mission is to explore all aspects of baseball thanks to accessible, entertaining and rigorous interdisciplinary research. Full House’s modeling project is an important step in the continuous efforts of the laboratory to develop measures in principle and neutral for the evaluation of the size of the players.

The ECK Sports Lab project has recently been referenced in a segment of the YouTube series “Baseball Bits” by Foolish Baseball, which explored the remarkable coherence of Hank Aaron throughout his career.