MLB teams with stat department
- June 15, 2007
Mitchell Watnik, Dr. Stats, can still swing a bat.When Major League Baseball descends on the Bay Area in July for the All-Star Game, millions of fans will be diving into a midseason frenzy of stat crunching. Earned run averages, hits and runs will take on mystical meaning as folks try to predict the likelihood of a home field playoff game or to score bigger bragging rights with their fantasy league teams.
"There's a tremendous interest in what happened in the first half of the season to predict what will happen in the second half," said Cory Schwartz, director of Statistics for MLB.com.
So what better time for Cal Sate East Bay to show baseball fans the world of statistics beyond box scores and the influence statistics has on the sport?
That's where Dr. Stats comes in.
Symposium coming. Mitch Watnik, a CSUEB assistant professor of statistics, has organized the Symposium on Statistics and Operations Research in Baseball. The event, which brings together academia, major league sports and the corporate world, will take place on the Hayward campus in the Wayne and Gladys Valley Business and Technology Center 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on July 11, the day after the All-Star Game.
Watnik, known in the MLB.com Fantasy 411 Listener League as Dr. Stats because of the whole PhD thing, used his reputation as the 2005 season champ to woo MLB.com to participate in the symposium. The Web site will also broadcast it later in the week.
Heavy hitters. Symposium speakers will include MLB.com's Schwartz, Mike Siano of MLB.com's Baseball Channel, Watnik, CSUEB history professor Henry Reichman, Joel Sokol, assistant professor of Operations Research at Georgia Tech and a host of operations specialists and statisticians from the sports world:
Chris Long, senior quantitative analyst, San Diego Padres
Sig Mejdal, senior quantitative analyst, St. Louis Cardinals
Nate Silver, columnist, Baseball Prospectus
Jeffrey Ma, vice president of research and
Mark Kamal, statistical analyst, Protrade.com.
Cal State East Bay, the College of Science and the statistics department are sponsoring the event with the Section on Statistics in Sports of the American Statistical Association, and the Section on Operations Research in Sports of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences.
"This is an opportunity to inform baseball fans what statistics is," said Watnik. "This could also be used as a recruiting tool for students."
Statistical growth. The university's Department of Statistics and Biostatistics has seen its students grow from 50 to 150 in recent years with many graduates going to work for health care and pharmaceutical companies.
But Watnik credits baseball with propelling statistics into popular usage. Baseball also inspired his statistics career.
"I got into statistics because I was into baseball," he said. "I eventually had to learn some theory."
Statistical theory is playing a growing role in professional sports operations. Fans who attend the symposium will find how professional sports teams like the Padres and Cardinals use statistics for more than drafting players. Those two teams are among the most aggressive in using statistics, Schwartz said, to analyze trends, find what influences attendance and discover ways to maximize revenue.
"I can give 30 different clubs the same list of data, and they will run with it in 30 different directions," he said.
The cost of the symposium is $12 at the door and $10 advance purchase with some free tickets available for students. For more information or tickets contact Watnik.
