Batting Order Research Articles

All bat, no glove: a history of the designated hitter

The basic elements of baseball remain essentially the same as they were when the first professional was played in the 1870s. Changes in this sport - when they come - come slowly. In 1973, one of baseball's most drastic changes was legislated: American League owners voted to add one player to the traditional nine-man line-up, creating a 10-man game in which a designated hitter (or DH) had a regular spot in the batting order, and he or a replacement for him batted for his club's pitcher(s) throughout the game. This change to baseball rules was approved in the hopes that DH's would provide a spark for the AL's sagging offenses; an explosion in hits, homers and runs would draw more people to their ballparks and enable their clubs to surpass the National League in the annual attendance race. This work offers a fascinating exploration of the history and place of the designated hitter in the major leagues.

An investigation of home advantage and other factors affecting outcomes in English one-day cricket matches

We examined the factors affecting the outcome of cricket matches played in the English one-day county cricket league. In particular, we focused on the home-field effect and the importance of winning the pre-match toss of a coin to determine a team's strategic decision to bat first or second. A home-field effect appeared to be confirmed in that home teams won 57% of all matches with a win/loss result. A logistical regression model was used, with the outcome variable defined in terms of a home team win/loss. We found that while winning the toss is an important aspect of a one-day cricket match, other factors tend to dominate in determining the result, especially team quality and match importance for the home and away teams in the overall league context. Our results also indicate, not surprisingly given the nature of cricket attendance and spectating, that the crowd effect is largely insignificant. The results of our study do not support any rule changes requiring the abandonment of the coin toss to determine batting order.

Optimal batting orders in one-day cricket

This paper concerns the search for optimal or nearly optimal batting orders in one-day cricket. A search is conducted over the space of permutations of batting orders where simulated annealing is used to explore the space. A non-standard aspect of the optimization is that the objective function (which is the mean number of runs per innings) is unavailable and is approximated via simulation. The simulation component generates runs ball by ball during an innings taking into account the state of the match and estimated characteristics of individual batsmen. The methods developed in the paper are applied to the national team of India based on their performance in one-day international cricket matches.

Dynamic programming in cricket: choosing a night watchman

In cricket, when a batsman is dismissed towards the end of a day's play, he is often replaced by a lower-order batsman (a ‘night watchman’), in the hope that the remaining recognised batsmen can start their innings on the following day. A dynamic programming analysis suggests that the common practice of using a lower-order batsman is often sub-optimal. Towards the end of a day's play, when the conventional wisdom seems to be to use a night watchman, it may be best to send in the next recognised batsman in the batting order. Sending in a night watchman may be good judgement when there are several recognised batsman and several lower order batsmen still to play (say four of each). However, with smaller numbers (two of each, for example), then, with very few overs left to play, it may be better to send in a recognised batsman.

Recalling the birth of alcohol science.

OCTOBER 1998 marks the 60th anniversary of a significant event in the history of alcohol problems in the United States--namely, the launching of a major initiative arguing that science, per se, rather than the political process hould be given charge of this longstanding American social issue. A news conference to that end was copresented by American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) permanent secretary, Forest R. Moulton, and New York's Bellevue Hospital psychiatrist, Karl M. Bowman, in the autumn of 1938--an account of which was published in Science (Reports, 1938). A glance at the newly formed Research Council on Problems of Alcohol's membership roster of that time shows that it included some of the day's leading scientific figures: for example, physiologist Walter B. Cannon, biologist Edwin G. Conklin, Bell Labs president Frank B. Jewett, Science Press editor J. McKeen Cattell, astronomer Harlow Shapley, physicist Arthur H. Compton, neurologist Foster Kennedy and economist Wesley C. Mitchell. What accounted for the assembly of such a heavy-hitting scientific batting order on behalf of new scientific ownership of the nation' s nettlesome relationship to alcohol? Repeal of Prohibition (December 1933) was not yet 5 years old, and already there were stirrings of a new Dry counterattack. One hotly debated alcohol issue concerned what schoolchildren should be told or taught about alcohol in the nation' s public schools in the new post-repeal era. There was widespread ambivalence about reintroducing the bone-Dry pedagogy that had gained dominance since the 1870s and 1880s largely through the efforts of WCTU advocate Mary L. Hunt. Many states formed educational commissions to reevaluate and reconstitute their alcohol-related pedagogic fare and, not surprisingly, these turned to mainstream contemporary science (as opposed to an earlier tradition of temperance science) for new content. In Virginia, two pharmacology professors, J.A. Waddell and H. B. Haag, completed ascientific report and were in the process of submitting it to the state legislature in early 1938. When word leaked to the press that their report suggested that moderate alcohol consumption was not harmful to the human organism, the state's network of Dry organizations flooded the legislature with petitions and letters voicing howls of protest. So strong was the public reaction that the state legislature voted to have all 1,000 copies of the new report bumed--unread!--in the furnace of the state capitol building, which decision was duly carried out on April 16, 1938, with the building's fire marshal ooking on. The event was not front-page news in the wider national press, but it helped spark scientific observers to mount the counter-initiative reflected in the Research Council on Problems of Al-

A Markov Chain Approach to Baseball

Most earlier mathematical studies of baseball required particular models for advancing runners based on a small set of offensive possibilities. Other efforts considered only teams with players of identical ability. We introduce a Markov chain method that considers teams made up of players with different abilities and which is not restricted to a given model for runner advancement. Our method is limited only by the available data and can use any reasonable deterministic model for runner advancement when sufficiently detailed data are not available. Furthermore, our approach may be adapted to include the effects of pitching and defensive ability in a straightforward way. We apply our method to find optimal batting orders, run distributions per half inning and per game, and the expected number of games a team should win. We also describe the application of our method to test whether a particular trade would benefit a team.

An Analysis of Baseball Batting Order by Monte Carlo Simulation

A Monte Carlo simulation of over 200,000 baseball games, using a programmed embodiment of the main features of the Sports Illustrated baseball game, shows that batting order exerts only a small influence on the outcomes of baseball games. The effect of using the best batting order rather than the worst is less than three extra wins per 162-game season. The traditional lineup, wherein a team's strongest batters hit in the third through fifth positions, is superior to a lineup in which batters are arranged in decreasing order of productivity.

Physiological Maturity of Little League Baseball Players

Abstract The physiological maturity of the 112 boys who participated in the 1955 Little League World Series was determined by means of the Crampton pubic hair index. The majority of these boys, who were chronologically 10, 11, and 12 years of age, were adolescent. Only 17 per cent of the boys were pubescent, whereas 37.5 per cent were prepubescent and 45.5 per cent were postpubescent. This suggests that the ability to play baseball is affected by the puberal spurt in growth. The postpubescent boys were equal in height and weight to the average 14-year-old boy. More pitchers and first basemen were postpubescent than players at other positions. Position in the batting order definitely reflected maturity.

British Food Journal Volume 55 Issue 10 1953

A pet phrase of a competent teacher of mathematics years ago was: “Figures by themselves have no meaning.” And everyone knows that statistics are deceitful things. Mr. W. Johnston's batting average in this country this year was 102, although his position in the batting order was never higher than number 11. He is reported indeed to have said of himself: “I am the ferret of the Australian team; they put me in after the rabbits.” But his position at the head of the batting averages could lead to a preposterously erroneous conclusion.