Inspiration
Given the packed schedule in an MLB schedule, how does travel and fatigue effect performance in the MLB? Does a team who has traveled a long distance on a back to back have an inherent disadvantage, or does travel have no effect whatsoever?
What it does
We built an XGBoost Model which predicted the odds of a home team winning for each game, given certain fatigue variables like miles traveled to stadium and jet-lag as well as the team's inherent skill, measured through the team's ELO ranking.
How we built it
To build the model, we found a team's fatigue-agnostic skill by developing an ELO ranking which takes into consideration margin of victory and recent pitching form and combined that ELO ranking with fatigue variables for both the home and away teams surrounding each game to predict the odds of the home team winning.
What we learned
We learned that fatigue and travel schedule has very little effect on in game performance, as the fatigue variables had very little influence in the XGBoost model.
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