brainwagon

I just finished reading Moneyball, and as I woke up this morning I was wondering what good online information was available on the mathematics and statistics of baseball. Such are the questions that Google was invented for.

Little Professor Baseball: Mathematics and Statistics of Baseball Simulation is the first link a search on “baseball” and “mathematics” produced. It’s a nice page that talks about the basic principles of baseball simulation, and gives you the rules for a simple (or advanced) game to simulate baseball games using whatever lineups you desire. In briefly glancing over the ideas, it’s a little simplistic, but it could be kind of fun.

In chasing down links from the above page, I found that baseball1.com has a downloadable database consisting of batting and pitching statistics for 1871-2003. It is even free for research use. I downloaded it as a CSV list, but other database formats are also possible. I like CSV’s because Python has a nice module for reading and writing them.

Further poking in Google output yields a book entitled Curve Ball — Baseball, Statistics and the Role of Chance in the Game. I may have to dig around and see whether it has good reviews.

Moneyball mentions sabermetrics: an attempt to bring some actual rationality to baseball statistics. I found this brief introduction and those terrific guys at baseball1.com have a veritable goldmine of links and tools.