Statistics and Baseball

Today we started to look at probability, the way of quantifying outcomes attributed to chance. Here is a summary of our discussion.

• Life and baseball are uncertain.
• We don't know if Barry Bonds will hit a home run in the next at-bat, but we can assign a number (a probability) to "Bonds hits a home run" that represents our belief about the likelihood of a Bonds' dinger.
• One way of thinking about a probability is a long-run relative frequency. Bonds' home run probability is approximately the relative frequency of Bonds home runs during a season.
• A first step in assigning probabilities is to think of a sample space, a list of all possible outcomes. The sample space for a plate appearance is SO, BB, 1B, 2B, 3B, HR,
• It is more difficult to assign probabilities to outcomes. We focused on probabilities assigned to die rolls.

We concluded by talking about a simple simulation game Big League Baseball that is based on three die rolls. We'll talk about probabilities associated with this game tomorrow.