Analyzing Baseball Data with R

The R Series

by Max Marchi, Jim Albert

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.

Genres: Baseball, Sports, Programming, Nonfiction, Science

352 pages, Paperback

First published October 29, 2013

Reviews

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an amazing book!

I have a dog-eared, beaten up copy of the first edition. I've gone through it basically cover to cover twice, and used it many times as a reference. I believe this book is now on a second edition, which I haven't seen.

The book is geared towards people who are new to R, but I think even novice to intermediate level users of R will learn from the examples as well.

In addition to helping you learn R, you will learn where various data sources are for baseball info, and how to access it with some real examples. The book shows how to access each of: The Lahman Database (Season-by-Season data), Retrosheet data (game logs and play-by-play data which has outcomes of every pitch of every game for the last 100+ years) and Pitch f/x data (detailed data on every pitch since pitch f/x technology became available, showing things like velocity, movement, and location).

I think even if you are only a casual baseball fun, the book would be a fun way to learn R using real world examples and data.

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

R, matey! Haha jk, not really about the Pittsburgh Pirates! To be completely transparent, the book really gets in the weeds... and not in the good way!

[Martin Frigaard · Rating 5 out of 5]

This second edition is fully updated with tidyverse code! I loved the 2013 version of this text, so having it updated so quickly is a real treat.