Project by: Joshua Sapira (11th Grade)
Project Advisor: Jacqueline Baker
Student(s)’s Advisor(s): Jess Prohias Gardiner
Description of the Project: In this project, I coded a program that suggests a pitch for a pitcher to throw based on a number of factors including the batter’s history against certain pitches, the pitcher’s arsenal, the count, the occupation of the bases, and other factors.
Final Product (e.g., documents, images, video, audio, poster, display, etc.):
Update on Progress from Weeks 1-3 (include any photos or video if relevant): With baseball being postponed due to coronavirus, the closest I can get to baseball is playing MLB the show and working on this project. With that, I have continued to work on my coding. I have decided that I want to build a function that utilizes statistics and game theory to tell pitchers what pitch to throw to the specific batter based on a number of different inputs. I have begun running regressions to see what features most strongly correlate with successful outcomes, and have thought about what outcomes should be considered successful based on game situation. So far, I have a very basic skeleton of what the final product will look like, but it doesn’t take into account a bunch of the features that I want it to. I am looking forward to continuing my work on this project.
Update on Progress from Weeks 4-6 (include any photos or video if relevant): Since the last update, I have continued to code – although most of my code has been data visualization to help me better understand the data I am working with and provide me with insight that I can use to help build my program. Right now, I am working on a way to provide a numerical value to an outcome. For example, as a pitcher, a strikeout may have a value of 1 when the score is 0-0 in the third inning, but that same strikeout may have a value of 6 with bases loaded in the fifth inning with a score of 2-1. Being able to assign value to outcomes will allow me to better find which pitch provides the greatest expected value. The issue I have been running into is the fact that there are infinitely many outcomes to any given pitch. I am in the midst of doing some research on how to work around this issue and am certain I will be able to get past it.
Update on Progress from Weeks 7-9 (include any photos or video if relevant): In recent weeks, I have done a lot of debugging and planning for how I am going to continue in the future. While I would consider my code to be serviceable at this point in time, I have a lot of ideas for improvements in the future. I think this may be something that evolves into a senior project for me. The problem-solving process is something that I’ve definitely had to work on throughout this project, and it is something that will continue to help me as I create more complex programs and try to analyze more complicated situations. All in all, this project was a huge success to me – I got a lot of work done and I learned a lot.
