Batter up? Yes, but UCI professor’s new baseball stat shows he’s not alone
Batter up? Yes, but UCI professor’s new baseball stat shows he’s not alone
- March 24, 2026
- Michael McBride, economics, talks baseball, game theory and more in this interview with The Orange County Register’s Andre Mouchard
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"There is no crying in baseball, right?
Wrong. At some point, everybody who ever plays ball — little leaguers, high schoolers, probably big leaguers when the cameras aren’t around —sheds tears. The game is just too gut-wrenching for there to be no crying. Instead, there’s a lot of it.
But you know what baseball really doesn’t have? Fairness.
Line drive outs exist. Swinging bunts exist. Foul ball homers, seeing-eye singles, blown calls, sunny sky pop-ups. Hundreds of unfair things can happen in baseball games, and those unfair things often affect everything from how we regard a player’s performance to the final score.
That’s where Michael McBride is stepping in.
McBride is an economics professor at UC Irvine. He’s also a data guy, an expert in game theory, which is a type of math that uses numbers to predict how an event will play out when that event is influenced by more than one unknown factor. (The late UCLA mathematician Lloyd Shapley described game theory, his specialty, as the “mathematical study of conflict and cooperation.”)"
Continue reading: https://www.ocregister.com/2026/03/24/batter-up-yes-but-uci-professors-new-baseball-stat-shows-hes-not-alone/
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