Introduction and Background

Hello! My name is James Parisi and I'm a senior at BASIS Tucson North High School in Tucson, Arizona. During this current school year, seniors at BASIS were given the opportunity to be involved in and do our own senior research project, what we call an SRP, in place of our third trimester of senior year. For our SRP, we pursue an internship with a specific research topic in mind in hopes that the internship can provide the tools necessary to answer, at least to some degree, our research questions as well as provide some much-needed experience in the workplace.

In my SRP I will be performing various tasks involving the organization and analysis of statistics for the University of Arizona baseball team. I will be primarily supervised by their national title-winning coach Andy Lopez, although I will likely spend most of my time with his current statistics team.

My project looks to determine how or why sabermetrics, a general term for all types of more advanced baseball statistics, can be used in college baseball. While they are already used extensively, it is not as apparent if they make any substantial difference for teams using them as it is in Major League Baseball, where it is well documented with books like Moneyball that sabermetrics are effective. My goal will be to see if sabermetrics are effective in the same way as they are in the MLB, and if not, what aspects of college baseball makes it less suitable for these same advanced stats.

I'm very thankful for this opportunity and I'm excited to see what comes of this project and my research in the coming months.