Data Mining Career Batting Performances in Baseball

In this paper, we use statistical data mining techniques to analyze a multivariate data set of career batting performances in Major League Baseball. Principal components analysis (PCA) is used to transform the high-dimensional data to its lower-dimensional principal components, which retain a high percentage of the sample variation, hence reducing the dimensionality of the data. From PCA, we determine a few important key factors of classical and sabermetric batting statistics, and the most important of these is a new measure, which we call Offensive Player Grade (OPG), that efficiently summarizes a player’s offensive performance on a numerical scale. The determination of these lower-dimensional principal components allows for accessible visualization of the data, and for segmentation of players into groups using clustering, which is done here using the K-means clustering algorithm. We provide illuminating visual displays from our statistical data mining procedures, and we also furnish a player listing of the top 100 OPG scores which should be of interest to those that follow baseball.