ABSTRACT

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Since Henry Chadwick began publishing boxscores around the turn of the twentieth century (Schwarz, 2005a), people have been interested in evaluating the performance of baseball players. In particular, the offensive contributions made by position players-in the form of both batting and baserunning-are the most obviously varied and carefully studied contributions. In this chapter, we will catalog the most enduring sabermetric models for evaluating batters and base runners. Our approach is model centric, in that we will attempt to categorize metrics based on the type of model on which they are built. It should not be surprising that over time these models have become more sophisticated, both in terms of the model complexity and the rigor with which any parameters are estimated.