Statistics and Baseball

Today we talked about a simple baseball dice game called Big League Baseball. It gives us an opportunity to talk about simple probability models and see how these models reflect real baseball variability.

• The single die controls the pitch. In Fathom, we simulated the process of throwing balls and strikes and found the approximate probabilities of a strikeout, a walk, and a ball "in-play".
• We compared these probabilities with the actual proportions of pa's that are strikeouts, walks, and inplay.
• Once a ball is in-play, rolls of two dice determine the play outcome. Probabilities of events such as singles, doubles, etc are easier to compute. We used Fathom to simulate this process and compared the game probabilities with the actual probabilities of play events.

There is a spinner activity that was handed. Each student will create a spinner for a famous player using his career statistics. Tomorrow, we'll talk about the process of constructing a spinner and talk about probabilities in this spinner game.