July, 2013, marks the first anniversary of my blog. First, I would like to thank each one of you for reading my postings and emailing suggestions for new postings. For those of you who have just started reading my postings, please use the archive feature to look at past postings. I am happy to announce that I have passed 50,000 views for my over 50 postings.
I would also like to take this opportunity to thank all of you who purchased my book, “Sandlot Stats: Learning Statistics with Baseball”, published by Johns Hopkins University Press. I thank you and have appreciated and enjoyed all of your comments. “Sandlot Stats” serves as the textbook for teaching my Baseball and Statistics course at Quinnipiac University. Since the basic mathematics needed is covered within the book, anybody can use this book as a tool for learning the important subject matter of statistics. The first 15 chapters teaches the subject matter of probability and statistics. The last three chapters apply the statistics covered in the first 15 chapters to baseball research.
My last blog talked about the probability of a current player batting .400. This is one of the topics covered in “Sandlot Stats”. For those of you not familiar with my book, the two leading characters throughout the book are Henry Aaron and Barry Bonds. The supporting characters are Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio. You can read reviews of the book and hear interviews on my websitewww.sandlotstats.com. This website also contains a wealth of baseball history and trivia. I hope you will check it out.
For the rest of my anniversary posting, I would like to talk about the wonderful baseball people and friends whose stories gave me inspiration for many of my postings.My first thank you goes to my wife, Tara, of 45 years, the designer and programmer of my web site and publisher of all my blogs. She has also put Sandlot Stats on Facebook and Pinterest so look for it there, too. Throughout this year, I have been invited to speak at mathematics conventions in Boston and San Diego, at the West Point Military Academy, at California State University at LA and at Amity High School in CT. The talks I gave ranged from my baseball research to the teaching of statistics with baseball and the history of baseball. If you would like me to talk to your group about baseball just email me. As my friends will tell you, I love to talk. Thank you to Father Gabriel Costa for the wonderful day you provided my wife and I at West Point. I really enjoyed meeting the Cadets and speaking to them on the topic of assigning probabilities to various batting streaks, including Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak. Thank you to Nikolai Yakovenko for coming to Quinnipiac University to speak to our faculty and students. Thank you to the former major leaguer Rico Brogna for coming to my baseball and statistics class to talk to my students about the use of sabermetrics in baseball scouting, Rico, I really enjoyed spending the entire day talking baseball and hearing your baseball stories. Then there were the many friends and casual associations which led to some of my blogs. Such a casual meeting occurred with a woman outside a store in Naples, Fl. It turned out her father’s uncle was the pitcher who was on the mound when Babe Ruth pointed to centerfield. I even learned more about Dale Long from his grandson who was one of my students this year. Thank you to my many other Quinnipiac baseball students who wrote blogs about how their lives have been affected by baseball. Finally, thank you to my friends and colleagues, whom I will not name for fear of leaving someone out, for all their support and encouragement. The blog will continue….