This year’s win for MLWGS at the SABR Analytics Diamond Dollars Case Competition marks the fifth in six years! The winning team consisted of three Maggie Walker seniors, Jonah Curran, Lorenzo Galang, and Pulkit Iyer, as well as two juniors, Sean Fang and Nived Sanjay.

The SABR Analytics Diamond Dollars Case Competition, according to team sponsor Mr. Dickson Benesh, “pits students from colleges across the country against each other in a case study contest based on sabermetrics, the analysis of baseball statistics.” This program works with the Major League Baseball organization (MLB), and the panel of judges for the competition includes analysts for the MLB. Nine years ago, in this university-level competition, Maggie Walker was the first high school to compete; since then, the event has become much more popular. “Participation in the competition by MLWGS has grown immensely since we first participated. Despite the increase in competitors, Benesh stated, “We are now tied with Syracuse University for the most wins in the history of the competition.” 

For this year’s win, Benesh shared that the teams were tasked with determining a way to liven up the game of baseball, “which is notoriously slow.” Benesh also discussed how the team, using analytics learned in the SABR seminar, as well as the Math Modeling class, was able to support their clever solution for increasing the excitement of baseball. Reflecting on the outcome, Dickson said, “The team was successful in the competition because they came up with a clever solution to make the game more exciting, and they were able to back their solution up with analytics.” 

Pulkit Iyer, a senior on the team, shared how the team was able to live up to the praises of Mr. Benesh. Iyer said, “As a group, we came up with a creative solution for the problem and wrote detailed code to simulate our proposition and show the projected changes.” According to the competitors, the problem at hand was to find a way to increase the number of batted balls per game by creating a set of rule changes that did not change the game of baseball itself. In the end, the team's solution was to make a pitcher throw a fastball for the first two pitches of every at-bat. 

Nived Sanjay, a junior on the team, explained, “Our team’s mix of sports and data knowledge lent to our final product both unmatched authenticity and quality.” Sanjay went on to add, “A group of students like this could not have been assembled anywhere else but Maggie Walker under the one and only Mr. Benesh.” Congratulations to the Maggie Walker team, and like Benesh always says, “Play like a math champion today!”