Book 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.
Table of contents
- Cover
- Half Title
- Title
- Copyright
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 The Baseball Datasets
- 2 Introduction to R
- 3 Traditional Graphics
- 4 The Relation Between Runs and Wins
-
5 Value of Plays Using Run Expectancy
- 5.1 The Run Expectancy Matrix
- 5.2 Runs Scored in the Remainder of the Inning
- 5.3 Creating the Matrix
- 5.4 Measuring Success of a Batting Play
- 5.5 Albert Pujols
- 5.6 Opportunity and Success for All Hitters
- 5.7 Position in the Batting Lineup
- 5.8 Run Values of Different Base Hits
- 5.9 Value of Base Stealing
- 5.10 Further Reading and Software
- 5.11 Exercises
- 6 Advanced Graphics
- 7 Balls and Strikes Effects
- 8 Career Trajectories
- 9 Simulation
- 10 Exploring Streaky Performances
- 11 Learning About Park Effects by Database Management Tools
-
12 Exploring Fielding Metrics with Contributed R Packages
- 12.1 Introduction
-
12.2 A Motivating Example: Comparing Fielding Metrics
- 12.2.1 Introduction
- 12.2.2 The fielding metrics
- 12.2.3 Reading an Excel spreadsheet (XLConnect)
- 12.2.4 Summarizing multiple columns (doBy)
- 12.2.5 Finding the most similar string (stringdist)
- 12.2.6 Applying a function on multiple columns (plyr)
- 12.2.7 Weighted correlations (weights)
- 12.2.8 Displaying correlation matrices (ellipse)
- 12.2.9 Evaluating the fielding metrics (psych)
- 12.3 Comparing Two Shortstops
- 12.4 Further Reading
- 12.5 Exercises
- A Retrosheet Files Reference
- B Accessing and Using MLBAM Gameday and PITCHf/x Data
- Bibliography
- Index
Product information
- Title: Analyzing Baseball Data with R
- Author(s):
- Release date: January 2018
- Publisher(s): Chapman and Hall/CRC
- ISBN: 9781315360591
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