THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

i think it would also help if FireJoeMorgan.com was still posting regularly.

You’re exactly right Tango, and that’s how I did market the class.  From the workshop description at Tutorpedia: “Students may not get to work for the Giants or A’s, but at least they’ll dominate their fantasy leagues!”

The odd thing was, given tremendous freedom to decide what and how we studied, the students I had didn’t really want to learn how what we were doing applied to fantasy.  I was certainly surprised.

Am I the only pre-college person who posts here? I got heavily into sabermetrics only last summer, and have been trying to further my understanding since. I definitely agree with the integration of sabermetrics and fantasy leagues; it seems like a great place to start.

On the topic of getting pre-college kids to go to school during the summer, it’s not going to happen unless the student is really serious about learning, absolutely not serious about learning(failed a class), or there is a significant amount of parental control. The only personal incentive I have for going to summer school is to fulfill a course prerequisite in order to take more advanced high school courses.

I suspect it would be difficult to get too many pre-college kids deep into sabermetrics because (at least where I grew up) high schools don’t teach statistics.

#3 - You can’t really get college kids to go to class (anytime) if they aren’t serious about learning, either.  Nor can you get a post-college baseball fan to understand sabermetrics unless they have some intellectual curiosity, too.

I don’t post all that often, but I’m a college kid, so basically same age.

I’ve found my friends fairly receptive to sabermetrics, which makes me think that the key to teaching this stuff to non-adults is to have them hear it from someone they know/trust/can relate to. I run a blog that is partly focused on the Mariners, but is more of an introduction to sabermetrics (introudcing stats like wOBA and FIP and some conceptual stuff as well.) Most of the posts go over real well, so making some progress with at least a couple of people. It helps to teach at a relatively slow pace and give detailed explanations for everything (duh.)

I don’t think having a sabermetric class is all that effective… who wants school in the summer?

"Am I the only pre-college person who posts here?”

I don’t post here all that often, but I’m a frequent visitor (and am pre-college, obviously, for this to be relevant).

I find that most of my baseball-crazy classmates will know stuff about Fangraphs and how it can help their fantasy projections. However, their understanding of fundamental sabermetric concepts is very limited. They will say, “FIP is better than ERA” but they won’t make any effort to understand why.

Do many pre-college kids play fantasy baseball? I’d think a good way to market it would be how to break records on xbox games or how to increase your statistics on your high school baseball team…

It seems like a lot of high school kids do play fantasy baseball.

Kids don’t get that much goal oriented learning (where they are chasing various threads to answer there own question rather than being told what they’ll need to know to do things they’re not interested in doing yet) in school so I think investigating how to win in fantasy baseball has educational value in that sense as well.

@#8 - increasing your stats on the hs baseball team only matters if the coach can understand it.  think about having a superior OBA to BA, most coaches would prefer, and play, those with the higher BA.

I think the class is a great idea but how many pre-college kids are really interested in taking classes in anything but what they are required to.