Can we predict the salary of a baseball player from their hitting stats?

Short answer? We can explain about 60% of the variance with our models, but we can't predict baseball politics!

We know from reading and watching Moneyball that baseball loves data analytics. Predictions like this are what made Billy Beane and the Oakland A's so successful, despite having such a lower payroll. As young aspiring data analysts, we thought to do some Moneyball!

We thought this would be a simple model. Plug in some statistics and get a salary. After many models, we discovered that player performance statistics only play a minor role in determining a baseball player's salary. After doing some further research on the topic to figure out why our models were not as easy as we thought we found another side of baseball we were not accounting for: “baseball politics”. This can include the team or league the player is in, how good their agent is at negotiating contracts, the length of the contract, injuries, the player's attitude in the locker room, and how good the player thinks he is. This is only scraping the surface of “baseball politics”.

On this website, you will find our models for trying to predict the salary of baseball position players based on their hitting statistics. These models can be found under The Process tab. After looking at our model we also have a Results page that goes further in-depth with our conclusion. The Explore the Data page gives you a chance to play around with some visualizations that our model does not explore. Lastly, we have an About page where you can learn more about the team, including our favorite baseball team!