Sabermetrics 101: Introduction to Baseball Analytics Review

Sabermetrics 101 is a beginner course in baseball analytics published by Boston University on the edX platform. The course is organized into 4 different content tracks: a statistics track, a sabremetrics track, a tech track, and a baseball history track. The statistics track covers basic statistical concepts like mean, median, measures of spread, regression to the mean and correlation. The sabremetrics track introduces a variety of concepts and computed statistics in baseball analytics like on base percentage, slugging, other hitting metrics and converting runs to wins. The tech track focuses on teaching SQL database queries using an interactive mySQL environment as well R basics. Each of the course's 6 weeks of content start with a brief overview of the material to be covered in each track.

SABR101x is a good intro to sabremetrics, but it suffers from several issues common to first run MOOCs that held it back from being a great course. The course has good instruction and the organization of the materials into different tracks was nice to let people focus on areas of interest. On the down side, information in the videos was sometimes hard to make out due small text size and poor color choices with backgrounds and pens. The difficulty level also seemed a bit unpredictable: the statistics track was very basic while the tech track gets into SQL and R at a rate that is probably a bit too fast for people with no background knowledge. In addition, tech exercises sometimes suffered from ambiguous wording and automated graders initially expected too much accuracy on rounded answers. Many of these kinks could be straightened out for a second offering of the course.

If you love baseball and have any interest in baseball analytics, you will probably enjoy this course. If you're mainly interested in analytics and picking up new technical skills, the SQL tech sections and SQL sandbox are the highlights of the course: you'll go from no SQL knowledge to being able to do basic queries and joins in the span of a couple weeks.

I give this course 4 out of 5 stars: Very Good.