Statistical Applications of Baseball

by David Bernstein

This book attempts to motivate statistics and probability through baseball. It consists of eighteen concise lessons that are presented in six different sections. It is neither a statistics text nor a book about baseball, but it hopefully informs about both topics. The advantage of the approach used in this book over the one employed by a traditional statistics and probability text is that this book is focussed on a set of issues designed to keep the reader’s interest. The same baseball questions and data sets are used to illustrate closely related statistical concepts. (e.g., the World Series and playoff duration examples which were used to explain the mean, median and mode are also use to explain the binomial distribution. Furthermore, the same batting averages, slugging percentages and ERAs, which are first presented to introduce descriptive statistics, are also used to illustrate probability concepts, confidence intervals and hypothesis tests.)The inter-connections between the baseball examples give this book a clearer more interesting focus than the traditional statistics and probability text which has a wider range of concepts that are generally illustrated with numerous unrelated problems. While this book has been designed to stand by itself, some readers may want to consult a traditional text book for greater detail on some of the statistical issues.

145 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 15, 1997