EdX offering 6 week on-line Intro to Sabremetrics Course (Free)

Ferm Sheller

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Mar 5, 2007
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I have no idea what to expect, though.  Maybe he'll watch 5 minutes of the first class and then walk away to load Minecraft on his ipad. 
 

absintheofmalaise

too many flowers
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Mar 16, 2005
23,336
The gran facenda
fuzzy_one said:
He's the kind who's never met a math concept that he didn't assimilate more or less instantly. Handling multivariate alegbraic stuff pretty easily right now. Hasn't really done any trig or calculus, however. He's intrigued by baseball stats in a "calculate his LL team's averages, OBPs, etc. in his head while standing in the outfield" sort of way. Does some basic programming. 
 
College courses run the gamut from mildly challenging to brain-breaking, which is why I was asking
He should be fine if he does this type of stuff. That's more than I can do.
 

BusRaker

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Aug 11, 2006
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fuzzy_one said:
He's intrigued by baseball stats in a "calculate his LL team's averages, OBPs, etc. in his head while standing in the outfield" sort of way
 
 
Shouldn't he be mentally analyzing the opposing hitters spray charts versus the expected pitches at various counts while standing in the outfield?
 

fuzzy_one

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Jul 14, 2005
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BusRaker said:
 
Shouldn't he be mentally analyzing the opposing hitters spray charts versus the expected pitches at various counts while standing in the outfield?
 
12yo narcissism is a powerful thing. 
 

wibi

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Jul 15, 2005
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Anyone who is unfamiliar with the R programming language might want to check out this link (someone suggested this to me a few weeks back in one of the other forums)
 
http://tryr.codeschool.com/
 

OzSox

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Dec 8, 2005
157
An FYI for those who have never taken an EdX course before: the discussion forums on the platform are quite poorly done. Typically there will be forum discussion components built into the course, which can work OK just for one reading of a thread, but if you want to really engage in the forums it can be hard to follow a thread, find threads etc. Having a thread on SoSH with its superior forum setup will definitely be beneficial.
 

tbrown_01923

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Sep 29, 2006
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I am on the fence on this - I am a good programmer and ran a computational finance team for a while (trust me I was serving as a manager and governor of good coding practice).  I have taken a general graduate level statistics for non-math / engineering corps, and I am already fairly competent in R and an expert in SQL.  I am nervous that this course will either prove to be too much work (I am starting a company full time, and consulting at two other ventures on the side - although my situation may be a little more straight forward by mid-may).
 
Push me over the fence - tell me I won't be neck deep in calculous and burdened with hours (more than 2 per week) of howe work and I am in.  I want to know more about statistical modelling as it relates to ball, and not a tutorial on r and mysql.
 

OttoC

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Dec 2, 2003
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tbrown_01923 said:
... I want to know more about statistical modelling as it relates to ball, and not a tutorial on r and mysql.
 
Well, if you audit the course and it proves to take up too much time or is not what you want, just drop out.
 

tbrown_01923

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Sep 29, 2006
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OttoC said:
 
Well, if you audit the course and it proves to take up too much time or is not what you want, just drop out.
 
I know but that would feel like a cheat to me.  I may just audit it and give it my best effort - my calculous is poor and my algebra is atrocious - it is more the practice and not the understanding.  Using R neither are likley to be limiting factors.  I guess I am in!
 

Scott Cooper's Grand Slam

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Jul 12, 2008
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New England
Bump to say that I'm in, and to remind people who might not know that this is available because it's fallen off the first page. This seems like a very cool opportunity for those of us who find sabermetrics appealing and data-supported arguments persuasive, but who've never practiced it.
 

pokey_reese

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Jun 25, 2008
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I've been learning to query in Postgresql because that's what we use where I work, and didn't really have any RDB experience before that.  Any idea how much of a shift to MySQL I should be expecting?  It's just a small shift in syntax/vocab, right?
 

Ferm Sheller

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Mar 5, 2007
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Whoo Hoo!  It's up.
 
Can't spend much time with it right now, but it looks pretty awesome upon brief review.