Chapter 10

Baseball: Exploring Data in a Relational Database

Deborah Nolan

University of California, Berkeley

Duncan Temple Lang

University of California, Davis

10.1 Introduction

Baseball fascinates many Americans and others, and many statisticians share this fascination with the sport. Nate Silver, who gained wide acclaim for the accuracy of his novel statistical methods to predict election outcomes, has also used statistics to study issues in baseball, such as the trade-offs in scheduling cold-weather games, home-field advantage, and effects of steroid use (see http://www.baseballprospectus.com/news/?author=59). This search for new baseball knowledge through statistical measures of in-game activity has been coined “sabermetrics” after the Society ...

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