Statistical Analysis of Defensive Production in Major League Baseball

While many statistical measures have been devised to measure team and player performance in professional baseball, relatively little work has been done to study and improve measures of defensive performance. This project’s goals were to model defensive contribution to team performance and develop related measures of individual player defensive production. Factor analysis was employed to extract positional factors and combine them with pitching and offensive measures into a final logistic regression model to determine effects of defense on team performance.