NJIT Professor Predicts Major League Baseball Wins with Math Equation

New Jersey Institute of Technology associate professor Bruce Bukiet has unveiled his annual Major League Baseball projections for the 2014 season that starts this Sunday. He developed a mathematical model for calculating win totals for MLB teams.

His model projects the Boston Red Sox, Detroit Tigers, and Oakland Athletics as the American League Division winners and the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim and Seattle Mariners as the wildcard teams. For the National League, the St. Louis Cardinals, Washington Nationals, and Los Angeles Dodgers are projected to be the division champs, with the San Francisco Giants and Atlanta Braves claiming the wildcard spots.

Bukiet sought to create a model to prove that a batter who hits for contact and gets on base frequently is more valuable to a team than a batter who hits for power and strikes out a lot. Crunching numbers since 1998, Bukiet and his model project the number of wins for each MLB team, the optimal batting order for the starting nine players on each team, and how trades can influence wins for a given team.

The development of such a model to predict outcomes is not uncommon. Sabermetrics, developed in 1980 by Bill James, is defined as "the search for objective knowledge about baseball," according to the SABR website. The success of this use of mathematics in Major League Baseball has been noted in the Boston Red Sox's World Series wins in 2004 and 2007 as well as the various playoff runs by the Oakland Athletics, thanks to their famed General Manager, Billy Beane. The movie "Moneyball" is based on Beane's journey to establish sabermetrics within the Oakland Athletic's organization in order to help a small market team compete amongst the big market teams who attract the league's biggest stars.

Sabermetrics is directly involved in analyzing player performances in various aspects to predict wins and losses in a given season. Bukiet's model is similar, but its applied more generally, obviously, since he isn't trying to build a baseball franchise from the ground up. Interestingly enough, his original theory of a contact hitter being more valuable than a slugger was proved incorrect when all was said and done. But that didn't matter to him.

"I publish these to promote the power and relevance of math. Applying mathematical models to things that people care about or enjoy, like baseball, shows that math can be fun as well as very useful," he said in this EurekAlert! news release.