Statistics and Baseball

Sorry I was away for a couple of days last week. But I understand Sherwin was helpful in getting you to make your spinners and understanding binomial experiments.

Today we played game between the "All Stars" (your spinners) and "ASB's" (my spinner cards from the All Star Baseball Game). Here are the highlights of our game:

• The ASBs won the game 17-14!
• Ralph Kiner was clearly the star of the game. He was 4 for 5 with two home runs, one triple, and one single. His grand slam in the bottom of the 8th broke open a tight 13-13 game.
• Although the ASBs won the game, their pitcher was pretty wild. The All-Stars had 11 walks during the game.
• Although the game was fun, there was room for improvement in the construction of the spinners. The heavy piece of paper was intended for the part that spins. Well, maybe the next class will be given better instruction.

We concluded by talking about binomial experiments. Suppose you know that a particular player, say Bobby Abreu, has a .4 chance of getting on-base. What is the chance that he will get on-base three times during a game where he has 5 PAs? We recognize this as a binomial experiment and then we use binomial probability tables to find the probability of exactly 3 on-base. We'll use this scenario to start talking about statistical inference tomorrow.