Do baseball stats really tell the full story? UC Irvine economics professor proposes new baseball stats to give fair credit to player contributions

Do baseball stats really tell the full story? UC Irvine economics professor proposes new baseball stats to give fair credit to player contributions
- March 30, 2026
- Michael McBride, UC Irvine economics professor and author of Game Theory, Machine Learning, and Production in Sports: The Fair-Credit Baseball Statistics, talks with KNX News 97.1 FM
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Baseball is back and for the next several months we're going to be discussing all kinds of stats that measure a player's success … but do they actually really tell the full story? An economics professor at UC Irvine says, “No, they don't.” Michael McBride has come up with his own stats that he says are much more fair. He wrote a book about it… “I think when we have a fair way of measuring what happens on the field, I think we as fans really can appreciate the players, and all the different things that the players are doing, because there are so many unsung heroes that don't get the same credit,” says McBride.
Listen in via SoundCloud.
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