Sabermetrics by the sea: Evaluating college players with the Cape Cod Baseball League

Abstract

From the dawn of the “Moneyball” system of searching for players with undervalued skills, an increasing proportion of players chosen in the Major League draft has come from the collegiate ranks, and while every professional team has an analytics department, the draft remains the last frontier for identifying and acquiring the best prospective players. Thus, it has become more important in recent years to evaluate college players properly, and while players’ statistics during the college season can vary wildly due to differing levels of competition, it is necessary to find a more objective metric for measuring college players’ skills. We propose that the most effective metric for doing so comes from observing players’ performances during the summer, when the variable of strength of schedule can be directly controlled, as players of the same skill level compete against each other. Our study focuses on the Cape Cod Baseball League (CCBL), a prestigious summer league that attracts the most talented college players, from which many players are drafted into the Majors every year. Our reasons for choosing the CCBL are the aforementioned homogeneity of talent; the lack of effects of travel fatigue, as the teams all play in a concentrated geographical area; and the league’s built-in replacement level, as temporary players often fill roster spots for players who had been selected the previous autumn, but whose college teams have advanced to the College World Series or who play on a national team during part of the CCBL season. This replacement level is used to calculate a metric of Wins Above Replacement, which we call cWAR.1