Mutually-antagonistic interactions in baseball networks

Serguei Saavedra, Scott Powers, Trent McCotter, Mason A. Porter and Peter J. Mucha

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2010, vol. 389, issue 5, 1131-1141

Abstract: We formulate the head-to-head matchups between Major League Baseball pitchers and batters from 1954 to 2008 as a bipartite network of mutually-antagonistic interactions. We consider both the full network and single-season networks, which exhibit structural changes over time. We find interesting structure in the networks and examine their sensitivity to baseball’s rule changes. We then study a biased random walk on the matchup networks as a simple and transparent way to (1) compare the performance of players who competed under different conditions and (2) include information about which particular players a given player has faced. We find that a player’s position in the network does not correlate with his placement in the random walker ranking. However, network position does have a substantial effect on the robustness of ranking placement to changes in head-to-head matchups.

Keywords: Bipartite networks; Ranking systems; Random walkers; Competition dynamics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:389:y:2010:i:5:p:1131-1141

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2009.10.038

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