Read Analyzing Baseball Data with R Chapman Hall/CRC The R Series Max Marchi Jim Albert Books

Product details Series Chapman & Hall/CRC The R Series (Book 14) Paperback 352 pages Publisher Routledge; 1 edition (October 31, 2013) Language English ISBN-10 1466570229

Analyzing Baseball Data with R Chapman Hall/CRC The R Series Max Marchi Jim Albert Books Reviews

• I'm admit am not really into baseball analytics. However, I have been slowly getting into analytics for other sports, and really wanted to start using R to explore my data. I am pretty new to R, so I had no idea what to do with 200+ variables had collected in excel, in Rstudio. So I turned to texts and other books but struggled. A majority of the time the books I read used business data etc for examples which didn't really help me personally, grasp how I could replicate the same commands using my sports data. Trying to find a book that has programing and sports in it is like finding a needle in a haystack. This book was the only book that came up in search results when I entered sports + analytics. When I stumbled upon it, despite it being about baseball, I bought it immediately after I recognized Jim Alberts name (from JQAS), and I am so glad I did. For those sports data lovers out there who want to understand how to use R to analyze your datasets rejoice! because this is only book you will probably need!!!!
  
  Prior to using this book had no programming background except a few seminars on python and since then have self taught myself further with code academy etc. As for R, I have been to 2 "intro" free seminars, and admit I only grasped the fundamentals of commands in the R console because the commands follow very similar structure those in a python terminal. However, in terms of R as it applies to sports, how and what commands I enter/use to answer various questions about my data I had trouble grasping without any examples to help me, a visual learner, learn from. Prior to this book no other book I've come across has provided examples with R being applied to sports. Thus this book has been a godsend. This book walks you though every command you'd use in Rstudio along with an example below it. From simple to more complex, everything function, variable, command, has an example which has helped me visualize and finally bridge the gap between the commands explained and how they are applied to the SPORTS data you have. Additionally, whats also nice is you use baseball data you can get online for free.
  
  For me this has been the biggest help EVER . Especially if you want to use R for sports. Even if it's not baseball I would still highly recommend this book because once you get the concepts of the commands applied with baseball data, its pretty easy thereafter to play around with the same commands and packages using other sports data. I am still toying around with what I have learned in relation to other sports concepts, since pitch speed, strike effects etc unfortunately are specific to baseball. However, exploring variables for other sports datasets is so much easier now, all thanks to this book. I do hope they think about doing a a series of these books for other sports, since I am sure many other sports fans would benefit from it, including myself.
  
  Additionally I liked how at the end of every chapter it gave the reader "further reading" suggestions, as well as great exercises to try. My only issue is there are no answers to the exercises in the book. Maybe I missed where in the book it mentioned you can find the answers, but as far as I understand, there is no answers provided to the exercise, which would have been nice. Hence why I gave it 4 out of 5 stars. I would have like to see them go through the answers, command line by command line as its entered into the console for each exercise. I hope (HINT HINT!!!!!) they will soon post this info online or something, that would be nice. Otherwise I could not be more pleased with this book!
• Great book though it suffers from typos in a few areas and the issue seems to get worse the farther into the text one gets.
  
  As an example, in Chapter 8 naming of objects isn't consistent in between text passages as well as in across the book and downloadable scripts.
  
  That said, I suppose one could say that is the nature of data analysis. A good amount of analytical work and even more debugging/data correction.
  
  I still consider this a great resource though it could use some polish.
• This book is excellent and I recommend it highly if you're looking to (a) improve your fluency with R and/or (b) learn how to work with the standard baseball datasets (Retrosheet, Lahman, etc.). I'm only halfway through and already my R skills have improved greatly.
• I am 50 pages in and decided to stop for a second to right a review because I felt I owed it to the authors. This book is fantastic! It is clear and concise and I can tell they have a deep understanding of R. There is no unnecessary wordiness and it is not the least bit dry for a book on a data analysis program. I have never really been into baseball (more of a basketball and football guy), but I am starting to get into data analysis/data science and thus have been trying to find good ways to learn R (and I have tried several). Somehow I stumbled across this book and am so glad I bought it. If you are looking for a good way to learn R you do not need to look any further. Certainly the gold standard for any type of educational book.
• Great book for a baseball fan
• Probably unlike most people who will buy this book, I am more well versed in R than I am Sabermetrics. I bought this book to teach me more about baseball statistics, and I figured it would be worth it considering Jim Albert's involvement.
  
  I have taken formal classes in R in graduate school, and let me tell you this book was a dynamite review and I think even better at teaching basic coding and packages than some of the books solely dedicated to R out there. It also directed me to some databases I was unfamiliar with and where to find specific datasets, which is amazing.
  
  This is a must buy for those looking to conduct statistical analyses on their favorite team while utilizing free software.
  
  Looking forward to next season.
• Tons of very valuable info applied to baseball research. Being new to R I found it easy to get started and tinkering with the projects in the book, however, I would have liked a more detailed intro to some of the language... Not really a big deal due to pretty much everything being available online.
• I now know how to write rudimentary code to analyze baseball data. I tried to use other books on R, and translate them to baseball; however, they were convoluted. This is the Holy Grail for anyone who wants to learn R and how it relates to baseball.