Paper Published: Comparing baseball players across eras via novel Full House Modeling
Written on June 7th, 2025 by Christopher Kinson
This research, “Comparing baseball players across eras via novel Full House Modeling”, was an Illinois collaboration among Adrian Burgos, Jr., Daniel J. Eck, Shen Yan, and me. We wanted to know if there was a better ranking mechanism for players when comparing them across time, especially eras, within baseball. We’ve all heard the names of baseball’s most famous players and about how talented they were - constantly listed in everyone’s top-n players of all time. Our motivation or curiosity was that a lot of those lists of top players looked the same and and many of the players mentioned played in a specific time of baseball - colloquially, we may say, when baseball was old and white. Yet, we believe there’s something nostalgic and lacking in that determination of greats. We think that the conversation around the all-time baseball greats might be a different conversation if we statistically factored in the competition in the era of baseball in which they played. Thus, we set out to make the playing field more even. What we discovered was that in that process, the resulting greatest baseball players stand to include players in the modern (and integrated) era as well as those in the earlier eras of baseball. Our research is elucidated in a journal article form and accepted as of this week by the Annals of Applied Statistics.
