For the Baseball Nerds: Sabermetrics 101 Online Course

[uno6518]

I just found out about this yesterday and signed up right away!

https://www.edx.org/course/bux/bux-sabr101x-sabermetrics-101-1558

This is an online course being offered through edx about the awesome science of baseball analytics. The professor, Andy Andres, has taught this class for years at Tufts, and has even had Bill James in for lectures. From the course page:

This course will cover the theory and the fundamentals of the emerging science of Sabermetrics. We will discuss the game of baseball, not through consensus or a fan’s conventional wisdom, but by searching for objective knowledge in hitting, pitching, and fielding performance. These and other areas of sabermetrics will be analyzed and better understood with current and historical baseball data.

The course also serves as applied introduction to the basics of data science, a growing field of scholarship, that requires skills in computation, statistics, and communicating results of analyses. Using baseball data, the basics of statistical regression, the R Language, and SQL will be covered.

This course has been successfully taught at the Experimental College at Tufts University since 2004. Many of its former students have gone on to careers writing about baseball and working in various MLB baseball operations and analytics departments.

You can audit the class for free, and go through it online at your own pace. You can also pay a small fee to get a course completion certificate, but that puts you on the hook for all the assignments and exams. You still get access to all materials if you audit, which is what I'm doing.

I'm a big fangraphs reader and proud owner of The Book , but definitely get lost in some of this stuff--I think this will be a fun course to really understand some fundamentals and then be able to follow the more nuanced things even more.

If you decide to sign up, post in here. If there are enough people signed up, maybe we can get a thread going come May (when it starts) to discuss the lectures and assignments--should be a good time!

[dsc123]

I love this stuff.  Thanks for sharing.

[uno6518]

I love this stuff.  Thanks for sharing.

Happy to--sign up!