The Research
The article that I looked at for this assignment discussed widely the science and research going on behind baseball. It brought up statistics from games, speculated performances, limitations of current players, as well as other topics. However, the majority of the study was devoted to explaining the most recent research on the physical ability of players. Their data was fairly inconclusive, and the ideas will continue to be researched for as long as baseball holds public interest.
Identify a statistical question that you could ask.
How do baseball players react/use this research and technology?
Identify the population you would study to answer the question. What information about the population would help answer your question?
The population would be all baseball players. Knowing their prefereneces(if they’re old school, they would be against new research) would be helpful so that both the proactive and old school communities of baseball are represented.
Identify a feasible sample frame, and explain your reasoning.
A feasible sample frame could be all of one team. This way, it could be made a requirement by the team for every member to fill it out. In addition, the team has to have an average age representative of the average age of all MLB players.
Identify the sampling method you would use, and explain your reasoning. What makes this method better than the others?
This method described above would be convenience sampling. Having all players partake in the study would be unreasonable, and having voluntary sampling would be harder to control than convenience sampling. In addition, quota sampling would be difficult to outline, as selecting age groups of players would have the same weaknesses as selecting a team that is somewhat representative of the average age.
Suppose you had the means to run an experiment on this sample. Identify the null and alternative hypotheses.
Null: Having knowledge of the most recent studies does not affect how MLB players perform Alternative: Having knowledge of the most recent studies does affect how MLB players perform
Identify the variables and treatments that would provide information about your question. Explain your choice of treatments.
Ind. Variables: Age of players, experience Dep Variables: Performance Treatments: Amount of research given
Identify the treatment groups, and how each subject would be assigned to a group.
The groups will be broken up in two ways. First, four overall groups will be created with average ages as close as possible to the MLB average. Then, one of the groups will be given access to the information for 1 hour, another for 6 hours, another for a day, and the last for no time(control).
Briefly discuss how the experiment would be conducted.
After each group has been given their amount of time to look over the study, they will be put into a scenario that will(hopefully) display to an extent whether they had learned anything from the study. Each player will be given 20 at-bats against a pitcher, and then their statistics will be compared to their season averages. Each player will go through this, and hopefully, the average of the groups will show some trend one way or another.
What biases may come up, and how would you address them?
The pitcher may be good/bad against certain styles of batting, and the players would be under different conditions than during their games. Overall, this method of testing is an imperfect way of seeing how the data affects the players, but hopefully a trend will appear with the amount of data being collected.