Reading the Game: Baseball Analytics in the Classroom

Students in Introduction to Data Analytics and Statistics analyze TrackMan pitch-tracking data from Transylvania’s own baseball program and deliver their findings to the coaching staff.

The project

TrackMan is the radar-based tracking system used throughout Major League Baseball and top collegiate programs. It records velocity, spin rate, release point, movement, and location for every pitch thrown. At most institutions that data stays inside the athletic department. At Transylvania, we brought it to the classroom.

Instead of a curated teaching dataset, students received thousands of pitches, hundreds of variables, and every imperfection real collection produces. Some pitches were tagged incorrectly. Some observations were incomplete. Working in R, students examined release points, movement, velocity, spin rates, and hitter outcomes, then reported what they found to an audience that would act on it.

What I wanted students to learn: that analysis begins before computation. One group noticed a pitcher’s data appearing to stabilize over time and initially read it as improvement. Investigating further, they found several pitches had likely been misclassified. They had to question the data rather than accept it.

Why an outside audience changes the work

The audience was not a professor grading an exercise. Coaches might use the findings; the pitchers were people they actually knew. Students revised for clarity because someone outside the room needed to act on the result, and they encountered the ethical weight of analyzing people they knew.

The collaboration continued outside class. Students and players discussed visualizations in the cafeteria, a player explaining how a pitch felt leaving his hand, a student pointing to a pattern in the data, each asking the other how the analysis should be built.

Coverage

Transylvania’s Third & Broadway magazine covered the project in Summer 2026: Reading the Game, by Stephen Russell.

What it grew into

• A reproducible R system generating scouting and player-evaluation reports
• A course in sports analytics
• Workshops in Health and Exercise Science on biomechanical inference
• A conference paper on using sports analytics to create undergraduate research opportunities
• Internship credit for students working with the baseball program, beginning next year

Students who joined without prior interest in baseball stayed for the problem. One added the Data Analytics minor and carried her project forward into Data Acquisition, Wrangling and Visualization.