MLB + Python Learning Course

Learn the Python coding language directly through the MLB StatCast dataset.

Oct 27, 2023

The time has come! The MLB + Python learning course has arrived.

If you’d rather get most of this information from a video of me talking, here you go:

But everything you need is written below as well, I would advise reading everything below regardless of whether you watch the video or not.

For a quick preview of what the course looks like, what you’ll get, and what you’ll be able to do after completing it, watch this short video:

How To Sign Up and Get Started

Step 1: Fill Out This Form

Step 2: If you are a student, e-mail a picture of your student ID to Jon2Anderson@gmail.com

Step 3: Wait for the invoice to come to your e-mail, and submit payment through that link.

Step 4: Wait for me to share the files and first video link to you

This will all run in your own personal Google Drive. To get set up, you will just have to download some files, unzip them, and then upload them to your own Google Drive, and then you’ll be off and running. The first video that you will receive walks you through this process.

What Is It?

This course teaches you the basics (and more) of the Python programming language, and it teaches all of the skills through the use of the MLB Baseball Savant / StatCast dataset, which is completely free to the public.

This dataset generates 90+ data points for every pitch thrown in all MLB games. At the end of this season, there will be around 750,000 rows in the dataset, all representing a pitch thrown in an MLB game. This is a massive amount of data. It powers everything you see on Baseball Savant player pages and even the graphics and analysis you see during games.

To a person without coding knowledge, there is nothing you can do with this much data. However, if you are proficient in Python, you can do almost anything in terms of generating baseball insights and analytics. This is the data and these are the skills that analytics teams in MLB organizations use.

This course is yours to go through at your own pace. It is not live classes, they are all pre-recorded videos and pre-written Python notebooks with all of the code you need. Even if your Python learning stalls, there is plenty of free code you can use to generate statistics and insights along the way.

What You’ll Learn

All about the Baseball Savant Dataset
Python (basics and some advanced stuff)
- Data scraping
- Data aggregation
- The needed basics of statistics
Data visualization
Creating and maintaining custom leaderboards in Google Sheets
Tableau Dashboards
How start an MLB projection model
And more!

What You Get

All of the Python notebooks with the code and the teaching in text format
All of the class videos where I go through and explain everything in detail
Group meeting sessions where I answer questions and expand on other stuff

Who Is This For

If I told you learning Python was easy, I would not be being honest. If you have absolutely no coding or data analysis experience or knowledge whatsoever, this will be a challenge and will require a lot of time to catch on to everything. But if you are drawn to baseball analytics, that is a good sign that you have the type of brain to be able to learn it with the proper amount of time, patience, and practice.

I highly, highly recommend learning these skills (from myself or someone else - there are plenty of free resources out there, but none of them will focus specifically on baseball data) to kids in high school or college that want to get into the data analysis field. Very few people get to work professionally in sports data (I don’t do it, this is just a side gig for me), but there is no shortage of very financially and personally rewarding careers out there in this field. Every company has data and needs skilled people to work with it. If you come out of college knowing Python and the basics of data analytics, you are set up great for the rest of your professional life.

The Cost

I am charging $150 for the full course for non-students, and $125 for students (high school and undergrad only), but will require you to e-mail me a picture of your current student ID to prove you’re not lying!

You will pay me directly through a PayPal invoice I generate, but you will be able to pay that with PayPal, Venmo, or a credit card if needed.

I really do not know what to expect in terms of how many people will sign up, so I cannot guarantee that I will be able to answer every single question and make time for every person who needs further assistance, but I promise to do my best in that regard.

Refund Policy

Since I’m immediately giving access to all of the files and videos upon sign-up, I cannot give any refunds, I apologize. But if there are any extreme circumstances, reach out to me and we can talk.