Game Theory, Machine Learning, And Production In Sports eBook

In this groundbreaking book, economist and game theorist Michael McBride presents an innovative answer to this question for the sport of baseball: 'How is individual performance fairly measured when success depends on teamwork?' The answer is — the Fair-Credit Baseball statistics.

Drawing on the Nobel Prize-winning Shapley Value from coalitional game theory, McBride creates two revolutionary measures of offensive performance: Shapley Run Credits (SRC) and Offensive Shapley Win Credits (OSWC). Unlike traditional baseball statistics, these new measures satisfy mathematical fairness axioms, making them the fairest measures of individual credit in the sport.

McBride combines this theoretical foundation with cutting-edge machine learning to analyse over a century of Major League Baseball data, producing the most accurate measures of offensive performance in baseball history. The result is a sophisticated yet intuitive statistical framework that finally gives players the credit they truly deserve for actual results — not projected or average performance.

Written for academic researchers, sports analysts, and baseball enthusiasts alike, this book successfully bridges complex mathematical theory with practical application. It offers technical rigor for professionals while remaining engaging and accessible for anyone passionate about understanding what really happens on the baseball diamond.

Contents:

• Preface
• About the Author
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• The Game Theory:
  • Coalitional Game Theory, the Shapley Value, and Fairness
  • Shapley Run Credits
  • Offensive Shapley Win Credits
• The Machine Learning:
  • Construction a Value Function
  • Training the FCB Classification Model to Do Event-Trigger Scorekeeping, with Robert MacDonald
  • Predictive Performance of the FCB Classification Model, with Robert MacDonald
• The Fair-Credit Statistics in Practice:
  • Leaderboards
  • Coalitions
  • Most Valuable Players
  • Fair-Credit Heroes
  • Great Games Revisited
• Bibliography
• Index

Readership: Academic researchers exploring innovative applications of game theory will find a detailed presentation of how coalitional game theory can be applied to baseball statistics; Sports statisticians and analysts — including sabermetricians (baseball analysts) — will discover the mathematical and machine-learning methods behind these new Fair-Credit Baseball statistics; Baseball fans and industry professionals can learn what these statistics reveal about the sport they love, even without delving into the technical calculations; General reader interested in the topic.