Using Publicly Available Baseball Data to Measure and Evaluate Pitching Performance

In contrast to many other sports, the game of baseball can largely be described in discrete events, and player roles are well defined, making it relatively easy to measure player performance. Perhaps the most important individual role is the pitcher, since they have the most direct control over run prevention. However, directly measuring a pitcher’s ability to prevent runs is difficult, since many relevant events depend on outside factors such as the team’s ability to field balls hit into play. Sabermetricians have created a number of measures that attempt to isolate pitching from fielding contributions, but many do so by ignoring certain events and/or using subjective/incomplete information to distribute responsibility using probabilistic models.