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Sandlot Stats

an innovative textbook that explains
the mathematical underpinnings of baseball
so that students can understand the world of
statistics and probability

- The Johns Hopkins University Press

 

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About the Author

Stanley Rothman Stanley Rothman is a full-professor of mathematics at Quinnipiac University. He earned an MS degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1967 and attained a Ph.D. degree at the same university in 1970. He then began his research and teaching at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. In 2016, he finished his 47th consecutive year at Quinnipiac. His goal is to break the consecutive year teaching streak of 51 years.

In 1973, he co-founded a computer consulting company, called Acc-U-Data, and served as its president until it was sold in 2003. The company specialized in developing computer models to solve real life problems.

His love of baseball began at a very early age. Having no siblings, he spent his pre-teenage years playing a board game called All-Star Baseball. Using disks whose sectors represented the probability of a player having various baseball outcomes, he was introduced to the rules of probability. In forming his teams and keeping their statistics, he saw how the Babe’s large sector representing a home run caused him to lead the league in home run totals. Fifty years later the game still exists.
AllStar Baseball Game

He was the shortstop on the Hackensack, New Jersey Little League All-Star team in 1957. Unfortunately, his team was eliminated in the first round by a Little League team from Palisades Park, New Jersey. His career in baseball was short-lived because of an arm injury and the non-existence of Tommy John surgery.

Dr Stan the Stats Man's Little League Team when he was 11 years old
Stanley Rothman is second from right

Even though his baseball career ended in his teenage years, he is a huge baseball fan. The player he admired most was Mickey Mantle. As you might expect from his favorite player, his favorite team is the New York Yankees. He follows every Yankee game either on the radio at work or on television at home. He listens to WFAN, an all-sports-talk radio show out of New York during the day. He says he would love to call in but just does not have the patience to wait.

In 2007, a colleague, Professor Larry Levine, was instituting a minor in sports management at Quinnipiac. He was asked to contribute a course in statistics based on the area of mathematics called Sabermetrics. His idea was to teach a regular statistics course with all the data coming from baseball records and sprinkling into the course interesting historical facts about our National Pastime. He could not find a book that did what he wanted. Thus, the birth of “Sandlot Stats” happened. The actual writing of this book spanned from 2008 until 2012. Whenever he became discouraged, his two editors Trevor Lipscomb and Vincent Burke, and the rest of the staff at John Hopkins Press kept him going. Every semester the school’s campus copy printed out a revised version of the textbook. This enabled his students to actively input what they liked and disliked about the book. The writing of this book took him into various research journals on baseball statistics and this rekindled his interest in doing research. The course called “Baseball and Statistics” ran for the first time in the fall of 2008. It has run every semester since and 2 sections will run in the Fall of 2019, where his finished book IS USED.


His baseball research included developing a new formula for assigning a probability to a player duplicating various batting streaks, the most famous being Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak. He now uses baseball research to introduce undergraduate students to research in mathematics. Currently, he is working with Kevin Faggella, a Mathematics Major, on developing a new method for choosing the best offensive player for a season. They will then compare their results to the actual MVP voting.

Stanley Rothman Professor Rothman gave talks at the joint meeting of the MAA and AMS for the years 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2012 - 2019. The topics included: teaching statistics with baseball, a new probability formula for batting streaks, and what it will take in today’s game for a player to hit .400 for a season. In January of 2019, he spoke at the JMM in Baltimore on New Applications for his Linear Formula.
Stanley, and his wife Tara, a website designer who is responsible for his website, www.sandlotstats.com, will celebrate their 52nd wedding anniversary in 2019. They are active ballroom dancers. In fact, Stanley is the faculty advisor for the Quinnipiac University Ballroom Dance Society. They have two sons, two daughters-in-law who are like daughters, and five grandchildren. Both their sons are practicing attorneys. One is in New York City; the other is in Naples, Florida.

Grandpa Stan, please, no more baseball stats.

 

Sandlot Stats: Learning Statistics with Baseball by Stanley Rothman is published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

 

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last modified 21-Jan-2019