For the Love of the Game
Professor Andy Andres shares his passion for baseball with thousands
Andy Andres was only five when his grandfather taught him how to read a baseball box score. The easily digested chart of runs, hits, and pitches helped fuel the sport’s ballooning popularity at the beginning of the 20th century and, at a time before internet and television, allowed fans to follow their team’s every move. The capability to monitor and analyze a game through numbers sparked Andres’ lifelong fascination with baseball statistics. Now the CGS senior lecturer in natural sciences and mathematics is sharing his passion with thousands of students in the online course Sabermetrics 101: Introduction to Baseball Analytics.
Sabermetrics 101 is Boston University’s first massive open online course (MOOC), which the University offers via the platform edX, an open-access education initiative that hosts free online courses to anyone with internet access, for no credit. The platform allows professors to post lectures and course materials, and monitor class discussions in online forums. BU joined edX in 2013 to extend its reach and connect professors to a global audience; Sabermetrics 101 is one of five planned courses.
In the video above, Andy Andres, a CGS senior lecturer, discusses the practical application of baseball analytics, the topic of his Sabermetrics 101 MOOC.
The statistical study of baseball, sabermetrics existed long before the term was coined in 1982. The field was popularized by the success of the 2004 book Moneyball (and its 2011 film adaptation), which chronicled Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane’s use of empirical analysis to improve his team. Beane’s system helped him find value in underrated players who might not hit big home runs, but who were statistically more likely to get on base and in scoring position.
In Sabermetrics 101, Andres, who also records statistics as a datacaster for Major League Baseball, will teach students how to use programming languages like SQL and R to process their own data analysis. “It’s not a full SQL course or a full R course, but I introduce students to these different technologies,” he says. The course also covers the analytics behind baseball. “What are the different ways that we can think about the game,” he says, “and measure the performance of the game, to help better understand the game?”
MOOCs allow students to proceed at their own pace, which is ideal for Andres’ class. “I’m taking all comers,” he says. “My students all have different skill sets. A lot of my students already know SQL and R, but they want to know a bit more about baseball. Some students know baseball really well but they want to learn some SQL and R.” Sabermetrics 101 also comes with access to the BU-built “SQL sandbox,” where students can explore using SQL online to process baseball data.
Andres, who previously taught a lecture-based sabermetrics class at Tufts University, says he’s excited—and a little nervous—about presenting BU’s first MOOC. “Getting it right while speaking to a camera is tough,” he says about putting his lectures on video for the first time. “There’s not a lot of forgiveness. And talking to a camera is awkward.” While a natural rapport exists between teacher and student in class, it’s difficult to replicate that intimacy on video, he says. “When I’m in front of students, I can see when they’re engaged and when they’re losing interest. For this class, we have an enrollment of about 17,000, and I can’t know each of these individuals or motivate them one-on-one.”
Still, the ability to reach more students is exactly why Andres was eager to put his class online, and he expects the rewards will outweigh the challenges. “It’s worthwhile to get this right,” he says, so that everyone who wants to learn is able to participate. “That’s the whole point of MOOCs. The open access. It’s about educational opportunities for everybody with a computer. It’s about trying to make it convenient for learners everywhere to understand this material.”
Andres says he designed the class for a student like his retired father, who has no programming language or sabermetrics background. “In my head, I’m always teaching to my dad,” he says. “If I can explain it to him, I know I’ve done my job. He’s not worried about grades; he’s just interested in learning. In my mind, this course is more about my dad, or a high school kid in Nebraska, learning something because they want to. Like any situation when you’re an educator, you hope that people will grasp onto something and learn it, and be excited.”
Audit Sabermetrics for free, or sign up for one of the BU MOOCs starting in the fall.