I read this: Smart Baseball

Smart Baseball, by Keith Law, exposes many common baseball statistics like batting average for the garbage they are. He does this in an approachable, narrative style that will appeal to long-time baseball fans. It's very light on statistics, but Law obviously knows his stuff; he just isn't interested in showing off the details.

Course Notes on the PitchRx package

These are the notes I recently delivered as a guest lecturer for Simon Fraser University's course on Sports Analytics. It's a course for people with some experience with R, but not necessarily experts. As such, I made these notes with a beginners in mind.

If you want to see what PitchRx can really do, I recommend the below links. However, if you want to get started and you don't have much familiarity with R, and possibly none with SQL, the following notes are for you.

SQL - An Introduction in 25 Minutes

Twice a year, the stats grad students from UBC and from SFU meet at the Harbour Centre downtown and have a one day seminar of student talks. Rather than present research, I gave a 25 minute introduction to SQL.

Specifically, it's a few slides on what SQL is, and some example queries using data from Major League Baseball's PITCHf/x data with the pitchRx package in R, and a package called sqldf. sqldf  interprets queries on R data frames that are stored in local memory or in .csv files. This package is very handy for writing practice queries when you don't have access to an external database, and faster than setting up one on localhost through Wamp server.

The example queries in the talk were a showcase of common clauses in a select query, and a simple join. Below are the PDF slides and the TeX code for the presentation if you wish to use it as a template. You won't be able to compile it without the images, so be sure to comment them out first.

SQL - An Introduction in 25 Minutes, PDF Slides, TeX Code