Offensive or defensive? – Application of DEA bootstrapping methodology on Chinese professional baseball league

Offensive or defensive? Which approach has the greater impact on winning professional baseball league games? Because the Chinese Professional Baseball League (CPBL) has only four teams, it offered a limited sample size for relevant studies. In this study, a window analysis was coupled with the sports team performance management model of the network data envelopment analysis (DEA) method to solve the problems of offense efficiency, defense efficiency and integrated efficiency of each of the CPBL teams from 2007 to 2014. Truncated regression was coupled with a bootstrapping method to perform a 2000 times repeated sampling, reduce the sampling error and determine the effect of environmental variables on the value of the efficiencies of the CPBL teams. The results show that the Lamigo Monkeys led in both offense performance and defense performance, whereas the United 7-ELEVEn led in integrated performance. The “total number of players” had a significantly positive impact on the efficiency of the teams. The 7-ELEVEn Lions and the Lamigo Monkeys showed superior performance with regard to the investment in the players and the long-term management of the depth of bench players, which verifies the importance of the depth of bench players in the CPBL. The “total bases gained” also had a significantly positive impact on the efficiency of the teams, which indicates the importance of the offensive capability for winning in the CPBL.