Baseball is a game of decisions. “Shall I keep the current pitcher or go to the bullpen?” “To swing or not to swing?”. “Pinch hit, or stick with my scheduled hitter?”. “Fastball, slider, or change-up?” The outcome of an individual baseball game can therefore be thought of as the cumulative consequence of a large set of individual decisions. Said individual decisions can in turn be pointed to afterwards as key inflection points in influencing the game's outcome. Think of the decision to pull Blake Snell in game 6 of The 2020 World Series, or the Carter clout of 1993. What if Kevin Cash had stuck with Snell? What if Mitch Williams had gone fastball rather than a slider that ultimately missed down and in?
Breathing life into the analysis of the decisions that make up a ballgame requires an invocation. We turn therefore to the branch of mathematics whose raison d’être is the analysis of strategy and decision making. If you have seen the film A Beautiful Mind, you will probably identify this as game theory, and you would be right. You would also be correct in guessing the work of John Nash, whose life the movie is based on, will be important.
This is the math behind simulations when playing MLB The Show and other video games. This is the math that allows us to dissect the decisions that compile into what you see on television on a nightly basis. Is it always perfect? No. Does it eliminate the need to have a feel for the game? No; just like advanced analytics doesn't. The analytics provides that data to drive the decision making process. Game theory provides the structure for analyzing in game decisions and their projected consequences in their own right. But baseball is still a sport, with unpredictable variables like a player's health or concentration, the weather etc.
At a front office level, game theory can be invoked to examine decision making around drafting and trading players. At a fantasy baseball level, for example you could analyze whether to top a bid for a player using the principles of game theory. From the pitcher's hand, to the GM's desk, the game of baseball can be thought of as a series of games within games, whose wins and losses eventually paint the picture of the wins and losses that show up on ESPN or FOX, in our morning newspaper, or in our roto league standings.
Join me over the next few articles as we delve into the games within games and enrich our understanding of this great American game of ours.
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