Ben Baumer

Benjamin (Ben) Strong Baumer is a statistician and sabermetrician. He is an assistant professor of statistical and data sciences at Smith College, and was formerly the statistical analyst for the New York Mets.

Benjamin Baumer
Born1978
Northampton, MA
CitizenshipAmerican
Alma materWesleyan University, University of California, San Diego, City University of New York
Scientific career
Fields
Thesis (2012)

Life

Baumer grew up in Northampton, MA.[1] His parents are Polly Baumer and Don Baumer, a former magazine owner and professor of government at Smith College.[2][3][4]

Baumer received his bachelor's degree in economics from Wesleyan University, and his masters in applied mathematics from the University of California, San Diego.[5][6] He completed a master's degree in mathematics at the City University of New York, and then a PhD at the same institution.[7]

Baumer is married to Cory Mescon, a public defender.[2][8]

Work

Baumer is known for his work in sabermetrics, including the book The Sabermetric Revolution: Assessing the Growth of Analytics in Baseball with Andrew Zimbalist.[9][5] He was the statistical analyst for the New York Mets for eight years, between 2004-2012.[10][11] This was shortly after the publication of Moneyball, so the use of statistical analysis in baseball was still a new field.[10]

Since leaving the Mets, Baumer has been a professor at Smith College. Upon arrival at Smith, he taught in the mathematics department.[11] He was instrumental in the development of Smith's program in statistical and data sciences, and is now appointed in that program.[12] The program is one of the first undergraduate majors in data science in the United States, and the first at a women's college.[13][14] Baumer is also a member of the advisory board for the MassMutual data science initiative, a joint effort with Smith College, Mount Holyoke College, and MassMutual.[15][16]

Baumer has written a textbook for use in data science courses, Modern Data Science with R.[17] He has several highly cited papers on pedagogical techniques for undergraduate data science education.[18][19] He has taught online data science courses for DataCamp.[20] He is a member of the national organizing committee for DataFest, a weekend-long data hackathon for undergraduate students. Baumer has also organized the FiveCollege Data Fest since 2014.[21][22][23]

He is the author of several R packages, including openWAR, a package for analyzing baseball data, and etl, a package for Extract, Transform, Load operations on medium data.[24][25][26]

Awards

Baumer received the 2016 Contemporary Baseball Analysis Award.[27] His project, The Great Analytics Rankings, was nominated for a 2015 EPPY award.[28]

Bibliography
  • Baumer, Ben; Zimbalist, Andrew (2013). The Sabermetric Revolution: Assessing the Growth of Analytics in Baseball. University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 9780812223392.[29]
  • Baumer, Ben; Kaplan, Daniel; Horton, Nicholas (2017). Modern Data Science with R. Chapman and Hall/CRC. ISBN 9781498724487.[30]
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References
  1. "Ben Baumer | Smith College". www.smith.edu. Retrieved 2018-02-25.
  2. "Cory Mescon, Benjamin Baumer". The New York Times. 2010-06-18. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2018-02-25.
  3. "Donald C. Baumer | Smith College". www.smith.edu. Retrieved 2018-02-25.
  4. Amanda Drane (2015-12-28). "When an accident took Maggie Baumer of Northampton's arm she rebuilt her life to help others". Daily Hampshire Gazette.
  5. David Low (2014-03-14). "Books by Gilbert '98, Baumer '00, Zimbalist P'02 Take Swings at Baseball History, Analytics". News @ Wesleyan.
  6. "Ben Baumer". Statistics.com.
  7. "Statistics.com - Dr. Ben Baumer". www.statistics.com. Retrieved 2018-02-25.
  8. "Northampton (Dist PD) | Directories". www.publiccounsel.net. Retrieved 2018-02-25.
  9. "The Sabermetric Revolution". University of Pennsylvania Press.
  10. Matthew Yaspan (2014-03-14). "An interview with former Mets stat guru Ben Baumer, Part 1". Amazin' Avenue.
  11. Adam Rubin (2012-05-28). "Stat guru Baumer leaving Mets to teach". ESPN.
  12. Cas Sweeney (2017-05-20). "A look into Statistical and Data Sciences- One of Smith's newest and fastest growing majors". Archived from the original on 2018-02-26. Retrieved 2018-02-25.
  13. Emily Cutts (2018-02-20). "Smith College provost named president of the College of William & Mary". Daily Hampshire Gazette.
  14. Steve Pierson (2014-12-08). "Universities and Colleges Creating New Undergraduate Statistics (and Related) Programs". American Statistical Association.
  15. "Jim Kinney". MassLive. 2015-02-13.
  16. "The Center for Data Science and MassMutual Host Local Data Scientists & Business Leaders". UMass Amherst Center for Data Science.
  17. Baumer, Ben; Kaplan, Daniel; Horton, Nicholas (2017). Modern Data Science with R. Chapman and Hall/CRC.
  18. Baumer, Ben; Cetinkaya-Rundel, Mine; Bray, Andrew; Loi, Linda; Horton, Nicholas (2014-01-01). "R Markdown: Integrating A Reproducible Analysis Tool into Introductory Statistics". Technology Innovations in Statistics Education. 8 (1).
  19. Hardin, Johanna; Hoerl, Roger; Horton, Nicholas; Nolan, Deborah; Baumer, Ben; Hall-Holt, Olaf; Murrell, Paul; Peng, Roger; Roback, Paul; Temple Lang, Duncan; Ward, Mark (2015-10-02). "Data science in statistics curricula: Preparing students to "think with data"". The American Statistician. 69 (4). arXiv:1410.3127. Bibcode:2014arXiv1410.3127H.
  20. Gabriel de Selding (2017-02-01). "DataChats: An Interview with Ben Baumer". DataCamp.
  21. Gould, Robert; Baumer, Ben; Cetinkaya-Rundel, Mine; Bray, Andrew (2014-06-01). "Big Data Goes to College". Amstat News.
  22. "ASA DataFest Contact".
  23. Carl Bialik (2014-05-02). "The Students Most Likely to Take Our Jobs". FiveThirtyEight.
  24. Ben Baumer (2014-03-17). "Introduction to openWAR". Exploring Baseball Data with R.
  25. Ben Baumer. "An R package enabling the computation of openWAR using MLBAM data". GitHub.
  26. "etl: Extract-Transform-Load Framework for Medium Data". Comprehensive R Archive Network.
  27. "Baumer, Brudnicki, McMurray win 2016 SABR Analytics Conference Research Awards". Society for American Baseball Research.
  28. "Editor & Publisher Announces the 2015 EPPY Award Finalists". Editor & Publisher.
  29. "The Sabermetric Revolution | Benjamin Baumer, Andrew Zimbalist". www.upenn.edu. Retrieved 2018-03-02.
  30. "Modern Data Science with R". CRC Press. Retrieved 2018-03-02.
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