America’s Pastime
The Major League Baseball season is finally upon us, after a long, baseball-less winter. Now we get to enjoy 7 straight months of 400ft home runs and 95 MPH fastballs. Especially in a strong baseball city like Cincinnati, heading to the ballpark is a great way to spend a summer evening. For those of you that may not follow baseball, I am here to make sure you can impress your friends with some baseball knowledge.
Positions
Just like in other sports, every position in baseball tends to have a certain type of player. Outfielder’s are often athletic so they can cover a lot of ground on defense. Shortstops and second basemen are very quick with strong reaction times. First basemen tend to be bigger and more powerful. This leads to a diverse set of skills throughout a lineup on offense.
Let’s look at a couple of metrics and how the different positions contribute to these metrics. I want to see what positions hit for better average, which ones hit more home runs, and so on. This data comes from the 2021 offensive leaders.
Metrics
We are going to look at 5 offensive metrics and how good certain positions are at recording those metrics.
Base Hits
Let’s start with hits. A base hit is recorded when a player records a single, double, triple, or home run. It is the basis of offense in baseball.
When it comes to base hits, shortstops got the most in 2021. This makes sense because shortstops tend to be contact hitters who rack up a lot of singles and doubles.
Home Runs
Now let’s look at home runs, which is when a player hits a ball over the fence and rounds the bases. This is how much each position hits home runs:
Shortstops also hit the most home runs. A noticeable difference in this graph is designated hitters (DH) had a drastic increase in home runs. This checks out because designated hitters are almost always big power hitters that are in the lineup specifically to hit home runs.
Now I want to stray away from the position angle for a moment. Let’s look at the relationship between home runs and runs batted in (RBI). An RBI is recorded when a player gets a hit and run scores as a result. The correlation is shown by the graph below:
As you can see, the more home runs a hitter has, the more RBI’s he records. Home runs are the most efficient way to score and drive in runs in baseball. As a result, based on the graph showing home runs by position, the position breakdown for RBI’s is going to be very similar. Since shortstops hit the most home runs, they will also be near the top when it comes to RBI’s.
Stolen Bases
Instead of hitting metrics, let’s look at base running now. Stolen bases are the key metric for not only fast players, but great base runners. The positional leaders in stolen bases are shown in the graph below:
Again, shortstops lead the pack. This does make sense because middle infielders tend to be faster players. We also see the different outfield positions (LF, CF, RF) with a lot of stolen bases. These are the fastest positions that pose the biggest threat on the bases.
Strikeouts
Now for a negative statistic. We want to see which positions strike out the most. Power hitters tend to strike out the most, so this may give us an idea of which positions will have the most.
I’m sensing a pattern. Shortstops had the most strike outs. There are a lot of shortstops among the league leaders, so this will naturally lead to more strike outs.
Shortstops Lead the Pack
Based on our analysis, shortstops lead the other positions in terms of offensive metrics. Since the data comes from the league leaders, this shows us that some of the best players in Major League Baseball right now are shortstops. They are involved in a lot of the action and hold a lot of responsibility.
Further Analysis
If we were to go deeper into this analysis, I would try to build a regression model to predict what position a player plays based on their season statistics. I am skeptical as to if we could come up with a statistically significant model, but it would give us some insight as to whether players’ statistics actually vary that much based on the position they play.