Teaching Tips

I have taught the course called Baseball and Statistics at Quinnipiac University every semester from 2008 to the present day. The book was developed during this period of time. The book has been used by over 400 students who gave valuable comments which improved the book enormously.

Teaching with Sandlot Stats | Sample Project | Completed Student Projects |
A Suggested Course Outline

Teaching with Sandlot Stats
In what follows, I present some ideas on providing a one semester course using my book, “Sandlot Stats”

With the help of a calculator, a student will perform each of the statistical processes in the book. By doing so, they will gain an understanding and an appreciation of statistical concepts.

They will also use Microsoft Excel as a statistical software package. It is not the strongest statistical package, but it is available on almost all computers and has enough statistical features to handle the tasks in this book.

The following five websites serve as major sources for baseball data; these sites are used throughout this book, and you will need to become familiar with them:

• Baseball Reference.Com
• MLB.Com
• Baseball Almanac
• Retrosheet
• Nationial Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum

As an additional book to read along with “Sandlot Stats” I choose either the book “Moneyball” by Michael Lewis or the book “56: The Last Magic Number in Sports” by Kostya Kennedy. These are best-selling books that provide background and relate to the course.

I also sprinkle into the course the history of the game of baseball to show the role of our national pasttime in the history of the United States using the interseting facts that I compiled over my years of research.

There are weekly quizes on the interesting facts, as well as the supplemental best seller and the statistics in Sandlot Stats.

In the first week of the course, I give the students their project for the semester. I pick a topic that parallels the chapters in my book. I want the student to use both descriptive and inferential statistics in their project.

The software tools they need are all included in Microsoft Office. These tools include Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

At the end of the course each student, or if they are paired each pair of students, give an oral presentation using PowerPoint.

I, also, ask them to provide a written summary of their conclusions.

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Sample Project

One project I used is described in the next paragraphs. Of course, there are many other possible projects that would serve the same purpose. Since many of the chapters in my book compare Henry Aaron to Barry Bonds, I felt that the project should have a comparison theme. In the next paragraph, I describe one of my best projects.

Each student is asked to choose two Major League players. The first player must already be a Hall of Famer. The second player is not a member of the Hall of Fame; however, the student should believe that this player may deserve induction. The website www.baseballhalloffame.org contains all the Hall of Fame players.

In selecting the two players, the following guidelines can be followed:

Of course, these guidelines are just guidelines, and an instructor may change some of them.

Beginning in Chapter 4, students will be asked to apply the same statistical methods used to compare the batting performance of Henry Aaron with the batting performance of Barry Bonds to compare the batting performances of their two chosen players. This process of comparing batting performances will continue in subsequent chapters.

The students will create a physical model in the form of a spinner.

The spinner can be assembled by physically making a cardboard disk with a spinning pointer for each of the chosen players or, more easily, by using one of the many available online spinners. A reliable online spinner is available from the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics on the Illuminations website .

The purpose of the spinner disk is to mimic a player’s batting performance and introduce the concept of a simulation. The disk is composed of sectors. Each sector corresponds to an outcome of a plate appearance. The area of each of the sectors corresponds to the probability of that player having that outcome. Spinning the pointer will correspond to a plate appearance (the disk is similar to that found in the classic game All Star Baseball by Cadaco).

At the end of Chapter 10, the students will be asked to give a preliminary argument on whether their potential Hall of Fame player should be admitted to the Hall of Fame. This argument will be based on the descriptive statistics covered in Chapters 1-10.

At the end of Chapter 18, the students will again be asked to answer the same question. They may or may not choose to change their mind, based on the new statistical techniques learned in Chapters 11-18.
Throughout the chapters of this book, the following baseball questions will be addressed:

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Completed Student Projects
Based on the sample project described above, here are 3 completed examples by students in my Baseball & Statistics class.

• Roberto Alomar as compared to HOF Ryne Sandberg
• Vladimir Guerrero ss compared to HOF Jim Rice
• Larry Walker as compared to HOF Dave Winfield
  

A Suggested Course Outline
Unless you have a class of math majors or a small honors class, it can be difficult to completely cover all the chapters in this book. For Liberal Arts students and non-math majors a suggested course outline can consist of the following:

Note: For a course in just descriptive statistics, use just the first 12 chapters.

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