Electronic Proceedings of the Twenty-second Annual International Conference on Technology in Collegiate Mathematics

Chicago, Illinois, March 11-14, 2010

Paper S096

This is an electronic reprint, reproduced by permission of Pearson Education Inc. Originally appeared in the Proceedings of the Twenty-second Annual International Conference on Technology in Collegiate Mathematics, ISBN 978-0-321-74614-6, Copyright (C) 2011 by Pearson Education, Inc.


Simulating Rare Baseball Events Using Monte Carlo methods in Excel and R

J. Scott Billie


Department of Mathematical Sciences
U. S. Military Academy
West Point, NY 10996
USA

Michael Huber


Department of Mathematics and Computer Sciences
Muhlenberg College
Allentown, PA 18104
USA

Scott Nestler


Department of Mathematical Sciences
U. S. Military Academy
West Point, NY 10996
USA

Gabriel Costa


Department of Mathematical Sciences
U. S. Military Academy
West Point, NY 10996
USA

Click to access this paper: paper.pdf

ABSTRACT

Statistics and baseball have had a venerable, long-standing relationship throughout the history of the sport. Practically anything and everything has been tracked by avid baseball fans, and whether or not records will be broken are debated constantly. Websites now offer data sets of hitting, pitching, fielding, and base running events for individuals and teams. Simulating certain events, such as hitting streaks or number of wins in a season, have become effective approaches to answering 'Will this record ever be broken?' One such seemingly unbreakable record is Joe's DiMaggio's famous 56-game hitting streak of 1941. We discuss a Monte Carlo simulation using Excel and the statistical package R to simulate such a streak using actual data from DiMaggio's own streak.

Keyword(s): software, statistics