General manager work

1. General manager work

Let's briefly discuss some more baseball terminology.

2. Continuing our baseball primer

On defense, there are 9 players on the field, and they have their own positions. The pitcher, marked as five, is a specialist who throws the ball to the catcher, marked as two. Pitchers are generally separated from what we call the position players and so we tend to analyze them quite differently. Among position players, we have five infielders: the catcher; three "basemen" who defend near the three bases; and a shortstop, who plays between second and third base. Then, there are three outfielders. In our dataset, we don't separate the outfield positions but there are real-life differences in skill between them.

3. Making an out

On defense, making outs is the most important thing. We learned in the last lesson that a putout happens when a defender directly makes an out.

4. Making an out

And an assist is when a defender throws the ball to another defender to make an out. If the defense records two outs on the same play, it's called a double play. Three is a triple play, which is rare. If a defender makes a mistake, we call that an error. Finally, because these are all counting measures, we want to know the denominator for rate measures. In our dataset, that is outs played.

5. Hitting for power

Not all hits in baseball are equal. If you hit the ball and successfully make it to first base, that's a single. A double means you end up at second base. If you get to third base upon hitting the ball, you've hit a triple. The best kind of hit is a home run, which means you touch all bases and then home plate, scoring at least one run on a single swing.

6. Calculating slugging percentage (SLG)

Slugging percentage is total bases reached divided by at-bats. Singles are one base, doubles are 2, and so on. We use another equivalent formulation in our dataset because hits include all four types, so we count each hit as one base and then add the marginal base differences to get our totals.

7. Our audience

You now work for a general manager. The GM is responsible for the business of running a team: he does not manage players in games, but instead handles contracts and ensures the long-term viability of the franchise.

8. Let's practice!

Armed with this knowledge, let's go!

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