THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Wow, another Sabermetrics class. Nice. I wonder how it’ll compare to the one taught by Andy Andres at Tufts University:

http://sabermetrics.hnrc.tufts.edu/

Wow.  Wasn’t expecting to see this pop up here. 

I taught the class Spring 2008.  As it turns out, the Dean of Undergrads at Rice is a big sabermetics guy and whole-heartedly endorsed the course.  It was designed as a light, one-credit course, though it could have easily been more rigorous.  We had ~30 kids in the class (it filled up just 4 hours after registration opened), including All-American Rice baseball players (the DIPS debates were fun). 

I had met Andy Andres previously and took a handful of ideas from his syllabus.  As you probably saw, much of the course material came from work published by frequent visitors to this site.  So thanks, all of you. 

The class was a lot of fun.  If I had stayed in Houston, I’d definitely teach it again, as a full three-credit course if I could.  The interest was definitely there, among both baseball fans and non-fans.

BenJ - can you go into more detail about the DIPS debates?  Sounds fascinating.  I’m guessing the Rice players had a tougher time understanding or believing DIPS than the non-players.

Don’t forget about people applying sabermetrics to other sports, like cricket!

For week 7 (context), I’d add this series…
http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/measuring-the-change-in-league-quality-part-three/

Click through to see parts 1 and 2. Also, there’s an addendum attached to part 3 after a Nate Silver (IIRC) critique of it.

Dan, I didn’t get around to posting the reading excerpts for the last couple of weeks, and I moved it around a bit on the fly.  For Week 7, I think I used the chapter of Baseball Between the Numbers as a guideline.  The Ruth vs. Bonds comparison, I think. 

#3: you’ve got the gist of it.  We got into some of the specifics, like control of GB/FB rates vs. BABIP for groundballs or flyballs.  As you’d expect, there was some skepticism.  The mathematically-inclined in the class saw the rates and correlations and were more amenable to the idea.  It’s hard to tell a 6’6” 1st Team All-American that the rally-killing double play he induced the previous night could have just as easily snuck through and driven in two runs, at no fault to the pitcher.  That being said- and we made this qualification in class- I think there’s a decent chance the DIPS assumptions aren’t as valid at the college level.

It’s too bad there’s not a comprehensive set of SABR 101/201 type materials all collected in one place, with references/links to as much source materials as possible.

I see the problem--it’s a long undertaking, and those who have the most expertise would not want to take the time to tackle this sort of project.

It seems the sort of thing that should end up on a Wiki, with one of those open source-ish licenses so people could archive it and re-post it if the site ever went away.  With the wiki approach, those willing to write could take the first crack, and hopefully, with enough review and occasional hints by the experts, we’d get it right.

Would there be any interest in such a project?  Maybe it could be “attached” to retrosheet or bb-reference’s bullpen?

http://www.tangotiger.net/wiki

We started it already.  No one wants to continue.

Ah.  I should have known.

A quick look through some page histories shows people like Tango, Patriot, and Colin as authors.  It seems to much to have you guys do the drafts, as your primary interest is likely in doing/reading actual analysis.  Whereas I see people on the Purple Row SBNation blog doing sabermetric primers and wonder if that sort of effort couldn’t be combined somehow.

I’d teach a course like this in a second, even for free.  Would be a lot of fun.

tango/8- I’ll add a Plus/Minus description, but I clicked the link and it won’t let me create the new page ("You do not have permission to create new pages on this wiki.").

Phil/10- my course, like any other student-taught courses at Rice, was on a volunteer basis.  It was so enjoyable that I never thought twice about it.  I ended up spending more time on it than most of the courses I needed to take to graduate, but it was worth every ounce of additional effort.

Because my wiki generates TONS of spam registration, I had to put in a 30-day waiting time period, to give me a chance to approve new users.  I used to do it every 48 hours, but the lack of newly created pages to spam ratio was not worth it.

I have tried (in the past) of approving faster than the 30-days, but it seems that once I put in the 30-days, I can’t approve faster on a case-by-case basis.

If a wiki admin wants to enlighten me, please do so.