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arXiv · 0907.5241

Mutually-Antagonistic Interactions in Baseball Networks

Serguei Saavedra·Scott Powers·Trent McCotter·Mason A. Porter·Peter J. Mucha
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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 interesting structural changes over time. We find interesting structure in the network 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 compare the performance of players who competed under different conditions and to 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 success in the random walker ranking but instead has a substantial effect on its sensitivity to changes in his own aggregate performance.

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Serguei Saavedra, Scott Powers, Trent McCotter, Mason A. Porter, Peter J. Mucha. 2009-08-07. Mutually-Antagonistic Interactions in Baseball Networks. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physa.2009.10.038

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