Sabermetrics 101: Introduction to Baseball Analytics

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 baseball 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, an emerging 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 was successfully taught on the edX platform as a MOOC in 2014. This course has also 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.