My driving question for the 20% is, why should advanced statistics matter in baseball and how can we learn about them? As a huge baseball fan, this is something that I find extremely interesting as well as pertinent for teaching math in schools. Recently, in baseball, advanced metrics (Sabermetrics) have been a huge part of free agent acquisitions, player ratings, and team building. While my favorite team, the Yankees, do not really use these metrics as much as other teams (because they have a lot of money), teams such as the Oakland Athletics and Tampa Bay Rays use these metrics religiously to help improve their teams. If you have ever seen the movie Moneyball, then you will have a slight idea of what I am talking about.
Relating this all back to school is pretty simple, Math in schools has always been driven by algebra/calculus rather than statistics or any sort of practical math. As a student who has never used anything I learned in algebra or trig or any of those, I see a practical application for statistics in an extremely large business in the US. Therefore, I think that statistics should receive a stronger emphasis in schools and I will use baseball as the main point of my argument for more statistics.
1. Very well-written blog; it was interesting to read, and very informative.
ReplyDelete2. Maybe make the claims a little more accurate? It seems somewhat misleading to say that statistics isn't emphasized in schools; there are entire majors dedicated to the pursuit of statistics/stat analysis.
3. Fangraphs has a website dedicated to the statistical analysis side of baseball, perhaps that would be of service to you.