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Even in the absence of fans voting for their favorites, college baseball players named to all-star teams aren’t always the top performers in their league.
That’s the conclusion reached by Adam Rosenberg ’04 (Ocean Grove, N.J.) last semester in a research project he conducted before graduating from Lafayette, where he excelled as a rightfielder on the baseball team.
It’s not a case of sour grapes for Rosenberg, who was named Patriot League Player of the Year this past season and had two previous All-Patriot League selections. He also was named to the Academic All-District II Baseball Team.
Conducted in a senior mathematics seminar, his research was within the field of sabermetrics, the mathematical and statistical analysis of baseball records, which goes beyond the conventional statistics recorded in box scores.
“The idea is to try to give a more objective evaluation of performance,” explains Rosenberg, who majored in mathematics and economics and is now working as an investment associate at Smith Barney in Manhattan. “Batting average and RBI’s (runs batted in) are commonly accepted statistics, but they might not be as descriptive as people believe they are. An RBI is a good thing, but it’s much a product of circumstance as skill. The idea of sabermetrics is to objectify that kind of quantitative thinking.”
He got his feet wet by looking at statistics for ten years of major league baseball seasons, then worked with data from the 2001, 2002, and 2003 Patriot League seasons. His results indicated that selections to all-league teams have reflected a fair amount of subjectivity.
“What I found interesting is that some players who seemed pretty productive didn’t actually do as much as some of their peers, while other guys who got less recognition were pretty solid offensive performers,” he says.
Rosenberg used a “run estimator” to calculate a statistic for how many runs particular players created. The equation calculated runs as a function of walks, strikeouts, singles, doubles, triples, homeruns, stolen bases, and grounding into double plays.
“I then deflated this by multiplying it by a variation of a statistic called On Base Plus Slugging percentage (OPS),” he explains. “This ended up estimating the number of runs scored by a team over the course of a year pretty accurately. The predicted number of runs ended up being within five percent of the actual runs scored for most teams. Then I used it on players to look at individual contributions.”
Another statistic he calculated was total average, the ratio of a player’s total bases accumulated compared to outs.
“It gives an idea of how well a player gets on base and how well he advances other players,” says Rosenberg. “It incorporates on-base percentage, slugging percentage, and batting average in one number. It gives you one base for a walk, two for double, three for triple, etc. I think it’s a little more descriptive than batting average.”
“Out percentage,” the ratio of outs to plate appearances, is another statistic that Rosenberg compiled. Unlike on-base percentage, it includes getting on base as a result of a fielder’s error.
“Another neat one is the idea of extrapolating runs created,” he says. “It shows the amount of runs that would be scored in a game by a fictitious lineup made of the same player in batting spots one to nine. It approximates the average number of runs that a team or player would contribute in the course of season, then divides that by the number of outs a player made in a year, then multiples that by 27 to get runs per game.”
Rosenberg’s research was guided by Elizabeth McMahon, professor of mathematics.
“She was very supportive and flexible,” he says. “She really allowed me to be creative and to pursue my interests. That made me feel like it wasn’t work. It was an enjoyable experience working with her and seeing how enthusiastic she was.”
Rosenberg’s research reinforces the fact that athletes at Lafayette are true scholar-athletes, says McMahon.
“His paper is really original work,” she says. “The challenge he faced is that when you’re analyzing the major leagues, they play 162 games in a season. The Patriot League plays just 30 games, and the standard sabermetrics statistics don’t work as well for a smaller number of games. He had to do some regressional analysis and then applied statistics to the players. He did a very good job.”
Rosenberg is glad that he majored in mathematics-economics.
“I liked the problem-solving aspects of my major,” he says. “My mathematics and economics courses presented a number of challenges, both conceptual as well as practical, that required creativity and persistence. To this end, I enjoyed the emphasis placed on collaborative problem-solving and the ability to communicate these results through writing and presentations. I would recommend this major because of my positive experience with the type of work, the classmates I worked with, and the extremely supportive and genuinely interested professors I had.”
Rosenberg served an internship with Smith Barney last winter and also interned in Lafayette’s Athletic Communications and Promotions department. The Career Services office was very helpful in critiquing his resume and cover letter as well as providing a mock interview, he says. A graduate of Neptune Senior High School, Rosenberg hopes to find further opportunities to explore sabermetrics. He received the Paul E. Koch ’28 Trophy as the most valuable player on the baseball team, which fell to Army in the finals of the Patriot League playoffs this spring.
Named to the Patriot League Academic Honor Roll, Soldan threw a no-hitter against Holy Cross to earn Patriot League Baseball Pitcher of the Week honors for the week ending March 28. He struck out four batters and walked two in the contest.
Over the January interim session, he traveled to Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands to take a Lafayette course, Medieval Architecture in Northern Europe. He learned first-hand about the accomplishments of medieval builders and Roman architects and studied Roman and medieval history to place the architecture in a societal context.
Senior seminars are among several major opportunities at Lafayette that make the College a national leader in undergraduate research. Lafayette sends one of the largest contingents to the National Conference on Undergraduate Research each year. Forty-two students have been accepted to present their work at the annual conference this month.