Baseball's numbers revered by many.

Publication: Orlando Sentinel (Orlando, FL)

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COPYRIGHT 2006 The Orlando Sentinel

Byline: Josh Robbins

For the past three weeks, almost a dozen students have met in a Bowling Green State University classroom for a summer-school session of Intro to Statistics I. It could be a bore, spending the months of May and June indoors, learning about scatterplots, histograms and standard deviation.

But Professor Jim Albert keeps the class fun. He borrows his data exclusively from the game of baseball. After Barry Bonds hit his 714th career home run on May 20, for instance, Albert compared the home-run rates of Bonds in 2001, Roger Maris in 1961 and Babe Ruth in 1921 to show how statisticians balance different batches of data.

"Students never really get into statistics because they don't like the examples we choose," Albert said. "Why don't we just focus on some application that would be fun to talk about and introduce statistics in that context?"...

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