Chapter 7 Conclusion

At a macro level, we found that baseball players in the APBA baseball game consistently have near expected performance at least 50% of the time for every statistic tested. This holds true for both player hitting and player pitching, although it did particularly well for hitting.

Along the way, we also learned that:
1.) left-handed batters tend to get in more games than right-handed batters
2.) that right-handed pitchers tend to get more wins on average than left-handed pitchers.
The first fact could potentially be explained by the fact that there are more right-handed pitchers in baseball than left-handed pitchers and, further, that left-handed batters tend to hit better against these right-handed pitchers than right-handed batters do. Hence there’s a lot of incentive to play the left-handed batters more often since a right-handed pitcher is often on the mound pitching. The second fact, however, about right-handers getting more wins on average, is quite unexpected and worth of further study.

On a more micro level, we found that APBA did much better at emulating the performance of right-handed pitchers than left-handed pitchers. It is also worth further investigate to determine why that might be.