Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Under Pressure: A Case Study Of The Effects Of External Pressure On Mlb Players Using Twitter Sentiment Analysis, Jonathan Huntley

Honors Projects in Mathematics

Performance under pressure and psychological momentum are well-documented topics in sports psychology, but most research focuses on “in-game” pressure. This study views pressure more broadly to examine how the external pressure of fans, quantified using the sentiment of tweets mentioning the players, can affect how MLB players perform. Although external pressure is intangible, it can impact a player’s psyche and performance. This investigation focuses on players Chris Sale and David Price. A new process was developed leveraging the Vader package in Python that can generate tweet sentiment to compare to several performance metrics from Baseball Reference. Results proved to be …