Analyzing Baseball Data with R Author: Max Marchi | Language: English | ISBN:
1466570229 | Format: PDF
Analyzing Baseball Data with R Description
With its flexible capabilities and open-source platform, R has become a major tool for analyzing detailed, high-quality baseball data. Analyzing Baseball Data with R provides an introduction to R for sabermetricians, baseball enthusiasts, and students interested in exploring the rich sources of baseball data. It equips readers with the necessary skills and software tools to perform all of the analysis steps, from gathering the datasets and entering them in a convenient format to visualizing the data via graphs to performing a statistical analysis.
The authors first present an overview of publicly available baseball datasets and a gentle introduction to the type of data structures and exploratory and data management capabilities of R. They also cover the traditional graphics functions in the base package and introduce more sophisticated graphical displays available through the lattice and ggplot2 packages. Much of the book illustrates the use of R through popular sabermetrics topics, including the Pythagorean formula, runs expectancy, career trajectories, simulation of games and seasons, patterns of streaky behavior of players, and fielding measures. Each chapter contains exercises that encourage readers to perform their own analyses using R. All of the datasets and R code used in the text are available online.
This book helps readers answer questions about baseball teams, players, and strategy using large, publically available datasets. It offers detailed instructions on downloading the datasets and putting them into formats that simplify data exploration and analysis. Through the book’s various examples, readers will learn about modern sabermetrics and be able to conduct their own baseball analyses.
- Series: Chapman & Hall/CRC The R Series (Book 14)
- Paperback: 352 pages
- Publisher: Chapman and Hall/CRC (October 29, 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1466570229
- ISBN-13: 978-1466570221
- Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
I'm admit am not really into baseball analytics. However, I have been slowly getting into analytics for other sports, and really wanted to start using R to explore my data. I am pretty new to R, so I had no idea what to do with 200+ variables had collected in excel, in Rstudio. So I turned to texts and other books but struggled. A majority of the time the books I read used business data etc for examples which didn't really help me personally, grasp how I could replicate the same commands using my sports data. Trying to find a book that has programing and sports in it is like finding a needle in a haystack. This book was the only book that came up in search results when I entered sports + analytics. When I stumbled upon it, despite it being about baseball, I bought it immediately after I recognized Jim Alberts name (from JQAS), and I am so glad I did. For those sports data lovers out there who want to understand how to use R to analyze your datasets rejoice! because this is only book you will probably need!!!!
Prior to using this book had no programming background except a few seminars on python and since then have self taught myself further with code academy etc. As for R, I have been to 2 "intro" free seminars, and admit I only grasped the fundamentals of commands in the R console because the commands follow very similar structure those in a python terminal. However, in terms of R as it applies to sports, how and what commands I enter/use to answer various questions about my data I had trouble grasping without any examples to help me, a visual learner, learn from. Prior to this book no other book I've come across has provided examples with R being applied to sports. Thus this book has been a godsend.
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