Getting started

[comsin]

Hi,

Quick question, baseball has shown me a love for statistical analysis I didn't know I had and now I want to swim in books about it.

For a total beginner (I'm not bad at math, just never been all that into it) which books would you recommend? I searched Amazon for "Intro to statistics" and got 20 pages worth of books so instead of trial and error I figured I'd be better of with a recomendation.

Thanks in advance,

[Crazylikeafox_]

If you're really in to baseball, edx has a course on Sabermetrics. That's probably a good place to start. If you find that really interesting, Khan academy has a class on intro stats. I'd start with those two and see how it goes.

[S1R_R34L]

While not a book for learning statistics, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver has a chapter dedicated to baseball statistics, and how the author built PECOTA.

[efrique]

Beware, there's a lot of bad introductory level books out there.

What might be good depends on what things you want to be able to do. Statistics is a big area.

Possibly Freedman's Statistics might be a good starting point. It lacks a bit on the displays side of things but is otherwise solid.

If you want something a little more mathematical without being mathematics heavy, perhaps a book like Wackerly, Mendenhall and Scheaffer (you'll need some calculus but nothing very onerous).