Building a model for scoring 20 or more runs in a baseball game

TL;DR

This paper models the rare event of a baseball team scoring 20 or more runs in a game using Poisson processes, analyzing historical data and predicting future occurrences with statistical methods.

Contribution

It introduces a Poisson-based model for predicting rare high-scoring baseball games and evaluates its fit using statistical tests and R software.

Findings

224 occurrences since 1901 in MLB games

Poisson process effectively models the event frequency

Predictions of future high-scoring games are provided

Abstract

How often can we expect a Major League Baseball team to score at least 20 runs in a single game? Considered a rare event in baseball, the outcome of scoring at least 20 runs in a game has occurred 224 times during regular season games since 1901 in the American and National Leagues. Each outcome is modeled as a Poisson process; the time of occurrence of one of these events does not affect the next future occurrence. Using various distributions, probabilities of events are generated, goodness-of-fit tests are conducted, and predictions of future events are offered. The statistical package R is employed for analysis.