The Moneyball Problem

Abstract

Athletes in most sports now have access to an abundance of information about the situational tendencies of their opponent(s) but it is currently unclear how effectively this information can be used or how to best present it. Three different methods for presenting situational information about a baseball pitcher were compared for college baseball players hitting in a batting simulator: Build-Up (shown cumulative pitch distributions), Full (shown complete distributions) and Control (shown no distributions). Initially, both the Build-Up and Full groups had significantly higher batting averages than the control group, however, the Full group had significantly lower batting performance when the pitcher was changed. Providing situational probability information gives a significant advantage to a batter, however, there is a trade-off (between short-term effectiveness and negative transfer) which depends on how the information is presented.