Andy Andres’ Baseball Statistics MOOC Widens its Reach
CGS professor Andy Andres’s baseball statistics course has a surprising connection to the Chicago Cubs’ historic win in this year’s World Series. Tommy Hottovy took Andres’ MOOC (massive open online course), Sabermetrics 101, before he found his calling as advanced scout and director of run prevention for the Chicago Cubs.
Hottovy, a former professional baseball pitcher who was drafted by the Boston Red Sox in 2004, took Sabermetrics 101 while rehabbing after a shoulder injury in 2014. As someone who enjoys stats and numbers, Hottovy says: “Along the way, I took the online Sabermetrics 101 course from Boston University. I was a finance major with an economics minor at Wichita State, so I have a numbers background. I wanted to refresh my statistics knowledge, and the sabermetrics course, which is obviously about baseball, helped with that.” Sports Illustrated mentioned the course in a recently republished story about the Chicago Cubs’ winning “combination of pitching, hitting and fielding in baseball.”
Now Andres, senior lecturer of natural sciences and mathematics at BU’s College of General Studies, is adapting that MOOC as a general education online course. The original Sabermetrics 101 MOOC focused on an insider, niche audience of baseball fans. It discussed baseball analytics, data science, the R and SQL programming language, and more.
BU’s Metropolitan College asked Andres to adapt the MOOC into an online general education class for the Undergraduate Degree Completion Program. The program offers an ambitious liberal arts curriculum online where students will graduate from BU with a Bachelor of Liberal Studies in Interdisciplinary Studies. Andres’ MET course revamps the math curriculum for , combining math and introductory quantitative reasoning with the fun elements of baseball. The Sabermetrics class (MET IS 342) consists of four credits. By the end, students will know more about the game of baseball as well as the fundamentals of baseball analytics. Although the course has a primary audience of off-campus students, it is also attracting BU undergrads who are on campus.
In addition to these classes, Andres will be teaching next semester’s Special Topics in American Studies course – CAS AM 502. The seminar will explore the history, culture, and science of baseball from its origins in the early nineteenth century, growth in popularity during the Jazz Age, to the controversy of the Steroid Era.
Read more about Sabermetrics 101 in CGS’ alumni magazine, Collegian.