Calculating Success in Baseball

Kerry Whisnant, an avid St. Louis Cardinals fan and professor of physics at Iowa State University, may be on to something that will greatly impact team winning percentages. Mathematical models that he and other fanatic baseball statisticians have helped produce may accurately predict teams’ successes. Whisnant and other members of the Society for American Baseball Research have analyzed baseball statistics, creating new theories about team success. The researchers’ work has implications for the future of the sport’s season predictability.