Statistics in Sports

Statistics is a mathematical science pertaining to the collection, analysis, interpretation or explanation, and presentation of data. It is applicable to a wide variety of academic disciplines, from the physical and social sciences to the humanities. Statistics are also used for making informed decisions – and misused for other reasons – in all areas of business and government. Statistical methods can be used to summarize or describe a collection of data; this is called descriptive statistics. In addition, patterns in the data may be modeled in a way that accounts for randomness and uncertainty in the observations, and then used to draw inferences about the process or population being studied; this is called inferential statistics. Both descriptive and inferential statistics comprise applied statistics. There is also a discipline called mathematical statistics, which is concerned with the theoretical basis of the subject. Stats or statistics are used in all sports as well as in all aspects of life. Statistics is used in sports to measure a players ability in specific areas of the game. Stats or statistics are used in all sports. Statistical analysis is best organized into two subsets: descriptive statistics and inference statistics. Descriptive statistics is used to summarize the data by organizing it graphically or numerically. Charts and graphs are used in descriptive statistics to show variation in the sample, or a chosen subset of the population being observed. An example of this in sports is in baseball a chart shows the percentage or times or amount of times a ball is hit. Numerically organized data is often displayed as standard deviation or as a mean. A mean is simply an average, while standard deviation is the measure of statistical dispersion, or how the information gathered relates to the mean of the data. One stat that uses mean is earned run average (ERA). ERA is the mean of earned runs given up by a pitcher per nine innings pitched. It is

Cited: Lane, David M. "An Introduction to Statistics." Hyperstat Online. 2007. Rice University. 4 Feb. 2007 .