Over the weekend of Aug. 24, Jeff Brover ‘24, Jacob Hahn ‘25 and Dr. Scott Powers attended and presented at Saberseminar in Chicago, which is both a charity event and a baseball analytics conference.
“It's an opportunity for professionals in the baseball industry to network and importantly, to recruit, because there are students who give presentations there,” Powers said. “I think that my favorite thing about Saberseminar is how accessible they make it for students to present, so I was really excited about Jeff and Jacob taking advantage of that opportunity.”
Brover and Hahn each took two classes from Powers last school year and then joined his research group during the spring semester. The two had baseball analytics experience before working with Powers though, as they were already working with Rice's varsity baseball team on analytics projects.
“They both were just already so well-prepared and well-versed in baseball analytics that it was very easy for me to come in and work with them and get them to work on the research that I was excited to get done,” Powers said.
Brover presented his capstone research paper from his senior year seminar on sport analytics at Saberseminar. In Brover’s research paper he was trying to find out whether people learn more about Triple-A batters when they face better pitches. Brover compared the same batters across Triple-A and in Major League Baseball, weighing all pitches equally and then weighing pitches by a separate methodology that put more weight on better pitches.
However, what Brover found was that his methodology did not help them learn more. Brover said the hope in the future though is that there will be more data to use and the topic can continue to be explored.
“I was a little bit scared of presenting a negative result because at the end of the day, even though it's statistically significant, it was saying ‘Hey, what we did is not better,’” Brover said. “However, a couple people mentioned to me like, ‘It can be scary, but I thought it was really good that you were okay with presenting a negative result and that it was a meaningful negative result in this case,’”
Hahn, on the other hand, presented findings from research he did as a part of Powers’s research group. There he was looking at one of the new rules MLB implemented during the 2023 season, specifically the rule that limits the number of times a pitcher can step off the mound, limiting the number of times they can attempt to pick off a baserunner.
“What that did, we realized, was that instead of having an infinite number of options for a pitcher, now it’s a finite number of options that a pitcher has because eventually you can’t pick off anymore and you're forced to pitch,” Hahn said. “So given that there is a finite number of outcomes, then we can do a lot of game theory type modeling on trying to determine which outcomes are best in any given scenario.”
What they came up with was what they call the “two foot rule.” This rule says that after every disengagement from the pitcher, the runner should increase their lead off the base by two feet. According to Powers, as the pitcher gets closer to their limit of disengagement, it makes it increasingly harder for them to throw over to pick off a runner.
“In actuality, runners are only increasing their leads by about eight to ten inches after each disengagement, so there is a lot of room for improvement and we estimate this could add 17 runs per season for a team,” Hahn said.
Hahn, Brover, and Powers all said that the reactions to their presentations were positive, and Brover and Hahn also spoke highly of the networking they were able to accomplish.
“This opportunity to publicly present every aspect of my project was very valuable,” Hahn said. “And it was really cool to be able to show teams the extent of what I think I am capable of doing.”
Brover is now a baseball research and development intern with the Tampa Bay Rays, and Hahn is in his senior year at Rice. Hahn also traveled to Vancouver, Canada in September to present his project again, this time at The Cascadia Symposium on Statistics in Sports.
Kathleen Ortiz, a junior from Kingwood, Texas, is double-majoring in Social Policy Analysis and also Sport Management with a concentration in Sport Law.