Fall 2025: How Effectively Do Baserunners Judge When To Be Aggressive?

In this project, I explore how effectively baserunners judge when to be aggressive on contact and when to hold, and how much run value those decisions add or cost relative to typical behavior. Rather than focusing only on outcomes like safe or out, the goal is to evaluate the decision itself given the context of each play.

A significant portion of the work went into data wrangling and feature construction. This included filtering Statcast data down to a precise set of on-contact baserunning opportunities, mapping aggressive and non-aggressive plays into consistent situations, and joining runner attributes with first-fielder defensive attributes sourced from FanGraphs. Only after carefully constructing this dataset was I able to model aggression, safety, and ultimately quantify decision value in a meaningful way.