Assessing the CPBL's Competitiveness Level

I ran a preliminary calculation of the CPBL's batting competitiveness level using Clay Davenport's multiplier concept. The multiplier is what to multiply your average (Equivalent Average in this case) to determine its major league equivalent. Davenport has the following multipliers:

NPB 0.93
AAA (PCL, IL) 0.86.

He pins the KBO at the AA level, without giving the multiplier.

What this method entails is taking players who played in two leagues, and determining how much the EqA goes up or down. I did this with players who played in the CPBL since 2010 who's played abroad. Twenty-ten marks the first game-fixing free year of the CPBL.

Since 2010, however, CPBL teams have largely decided to use their foreign player allotment on pitchers. That gives us an extremely small sample size of foreign hitters:

Manny Ramirez
Marshall McDougall
Michael Cervenak
Henry Mateo

On the other hand, since 2010 more Taiwanese in the states have returned home to play.

Chin-feng Chen
Chin-lung Hu
Yen-wen Kuo
Yung-chi Chen
Kuo-hui Kao

I used 1 season in each league if they amount to at least 200 plate appears, two or three seasons if they don't.

I found the multiplier for CPBL batting to be 0.75.

Unsurprisingly, Taiwanese players increase their performance by a greater margin when at ease in their home country than foreigners playing in Taiwan.

The multiplier for Taiwanese players is 0.69. For foreign players, 0.88.

There are quite a few limitations to this study. I treat edeach player as one observation. I will recalculate by weighting each player by plate appearances.

I also only compared foreigner player CPBL performance with their USA/Mexico performance in the prior year or years. Including the following year, e.g., Manny's return to Round Rock, would give me a larger sample size.