Ken Ross's book A Mathematician at the Ballpark could just as easily be called A Mathematician at the Race Track, or at the Mall, or at the Grocery Store. It doesn't matter that a mathematician is at the ballpark if he refuses to talk about baseball.
The book contains eight chapters. The first, called "Who's the best hitter?", explains what goes into calculating batting average, OPS, and other statistics. Is it a useful chapter? Yes, if you don't already know how to calculate these averages. Of the next seven chapters, one doesn't even mention baseball, and a couple more simply use baseball examples to teach universal lessons, like explaining that if the Braves are 3:2 favorites to win a ballgame, that means that they will win 3 out of 5 times.
One area in which the book succeeds is in proving that "streakiness," whose existence has long been debated by sports fans and statisticians, does in fact exist. Sports fans have long looked for evidence that streakiness is exists in sports despite the number of mathematicians stacked against them. Ross does give evidence of streakiness in the final chapter; unfortunately it comes from another mathematician's research, comes from the sport of bowling, and is used simply to assume streakiness in other sports.
How sad it must be to be an academic looking for a real-world application for his research. We've seen great books like the Popular Culture and Philosophy series and Freakonomics show how seemingly impractical topics can be applied to life. The groundbreaking work of statistician Bill James has shown that baseball is rich with applications for hard math. But in order to create value for true baseball fans with even the slightest understanding of mathematics, you need to do a little more than explain what an average is or show how betting works. This book should serve as a lesson: if you have a field of study you want to connect with a market interested in a different topic, make sure you can connect the two meaningfully.
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