Teaching Statistics Using Baseball Review

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(More customer reviews)Jim Albert is a Professor of Statistics at Bowling Green University. He is an excellent teacher and researcher. He has written a number of fine statistics books including a recent one on doing Bayesian statistics using R. He is also an avid baseball fan and has published statistical articles and books on the subject. My favorite is "Curve Ball" which he coauthored with Jay Bennett. He is one of the leaders in the American Statistical Associations section on statistics in sports.
Once at an ASA meeting I heard him give a talk about how he was able to make statistics exciting for non-statistics majors by teaching it solely using baseball examples. His course became one of the most popular in the school which is amazing. Most students who are required to take statistics don't understand why it is an important discipline to learn about. They are usually bored to tears because of the dry presentation of the usual statistics lectures. These courses are generally hated by these students and they avoid them if at all possible. Albert's approach is new and seems to be working. I think he wrote this book for statistics teachers to help them learn how to teach a course like this. This book can serve as a basic statistics text or as a reference for those fond of sabermetrics.

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"Teaching Statistics Using Baseball " is a collection of case studies and exercises applying statistical and probabilistic thinking to the game of baseball. Baseball is the most statistical of all sports, since players are identified and evaluated by their corresponding hitting and pitching statistics.There is an active effort by people in the baseball community to learn more about baseball performance and strategy by the use of statistics.This book illustrates basic methods of data analysis and probability models by means of baseball statistics collected on players and teams.Students often have difficulty learning statistics ideas since they are explained using examples that are foreign to the students. The idea of the book is to describe statistical thinking in a context (that is, baseball) that will be familiar and interesting to students.The book is organized using a same structure as most introductory statistics texts.There are chapters on the analysis on a single batch of data, followed with chapters on comparing batches of data and relationships.There are chapters on probability models and on statistical inference.The book can be used as the framework for a one-semester introductory statistics class focused on baseball or sports.This type of class has been taught at Bowling Green State University.It may be very suitable for a statistics class for students with sports-related majors, such as sports management or sports medicine.Alternately, the book can be used as a resource for instructors who wish to infuse their present course in probability or statistics with applications from baseball.

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