Finding Further Research and College Classes

My question centers around why we do not teach practical math classes in school and how baseball can be used to make math classes more interesting. The main focus of these classes usually is sabermetrics, which are statistical measures used to project a baseball player or teams productivity. My comments revolved around adding more websites that related to my blog, so I will include those in my next blog post. In this blog post, I will talk about the increase in the availability of sabermetrics classes in colleges and the increased use of this skill set in baseball front offices.

As of 2007, the only college I could find that offered a sabermetrics course was Tufts University. Before that, you had to just take statistics classes and try to figure out how to graph out these findings on your own. Now, in 2014, there are a lot more schools that offer sabermetrics including Boston University, West Point, and Rutgers University. This shows that some schools statistics and athletics departments are seeing the importance of this class and how it relates to an actual real life job. The best part is that it is an elective meaning that the people who taking it are going to want to take it and want to learn about this and possibly try to get a job in baseball.

That is what I find most important about sabermetrics and mastering them, is that there are high paying jobs out there that require the skills learned by focusing on the statistical analysis of baseball. Also, not all of these jobs are in baseball. While baseball is probably the most prolific area hiring people with sabermetrics backgrounds, statistician Nate Silver has shown that statistical analysis can be used for just about everything. Silver gained renown for predicting 49/50 states correctly in the 2012 Presidential elections by using only statistics. From this popularity, he has started moving his "brand" into sports and other more lucrative areas. So, statistical knowledge can be an extremely profitable skill set to have and I think it's great to see that schools are starting to jump onto the sabermetrics bandwagon.