Book Reviews - October 2008 - Volume 108 (6)

Fantasy Baseball and Mathematics: A Resource Guide for Teachers and Parents

Author: Dan Flockhart
Jossey-Bass: An Imprint of Wiley
989 Market Street
San Francisco, CA 94103-1741
2007; 203 pages
Paperback; $24.95

Reviewer: Carl Miller
Northern Kentucky University
Highland Heights, KY 41099

Fantasy Baseball and Mathematics: A Resource Guide for Teachers and Parents is a potential goldmine for instruction. As a resource tool, this may be used by a teacher in the classroom, or even by a parent during the summer, to guide young learners. There are multiple examples given which clearly explain the overall process, and the numerous handouts included make the workload very minimal. Overall, this a tremendous resource for playing fantasy baseball.

The first chapter begins with an overview of the game. Initially, there are two options given for choosing teams. The first option includes a salary cap restriction, which can be used to stimulate discussion about optimum strategy for the “best” fantasy team as opposed to selecting “best” individual players. Note that a fantasy team is virtually always comprised of players from different major league baseball (MLB) teams. The second option allows the selection of one of the actual MLB teams each week. Of course the instructor can add complexity by allowing trades or player replacements for injuries.

The next step involves reading the box score from a newspaper or electronic source. Many people will check a web resource such as ESPN's website, MLB's website, or a local news source's website to locate the box scores. Details are clearly given on how to read the information for both the position players (non-pitchers) and for the pitchers. These daily results will then be used to tally points for each student's team. Depending on the scoring system used, this tally may be very quick, around 15 minutes, or considerably longer for more complicated systems. Also, a teacher using this while teaching various topics may choose to use a different system for scoring each week (daily would likely be too cumbersome). This would add flexibility and keep the scoring fresh (i.e.: not the same repetitive system for multiple weeks).

Perhaps one of the strongest things about the book now appears. Page 17 begins the different scoring systems. These are broken down into Integers (1-3), Fractions (4-41), Decimals (42-71), Fractions and Decimals combined (72-97), Fractions with Positive Exponents (98-105), Fractions with Negative Exponents (106-113), Decimals with Positive Exponents (114-121), Decimals with Negative Exponents (122-129), Integers with Positive Exponents (130-139), Integers with Negative Exponents (140-149), Roots (150-157), Factorials and Summations (158-161), and “everything mixed together” (162-165). So teachers and parents do not have to develop their own scoring systems, although they are welcome to do so. There are scoring systems which allow very simple calculations (i.e.: Integers) for elementary level children or just to get used to scoring, all the way to the very complex mixing of roots, fractions, and exponents all mingled together, which could challenge high school students. The only drawback that might be present is that there is so much available, some people might feel overwhelmed at the options. But this could be used to teach about organization and attention to detail. So if students are told to use the scoring system numbered 147, and they do not, a discussion on lack of attention to detail can be held. Although it is not directly a math topic, this organizational ability is still extremely necessary to “do the math.” So not only is a math lesson being taught, but also a life lesson.

Chapter 2 then discusses the handouts in detail. Examples are given as to how to fill out each sheet, from initially selecting a team, to reading box scores to get a player's results, to tallying points for the current scoring system, and tracking point totals across time. The next section then discusses using graphical displays to represent information. Circle graphs, bar charts, and multiple line graphs are represented, but teachers can always modify these to include other displays they may be discussing.

Chapter 4 begins to use sports data within common mathematics topics. From things like equivalent fractions, to percentage changes in prices, to unit conversions, examples using baseball and other sports data are given. Chapter 5 then gives matching quizzes over the same material discussed in chapter 4. This allows discussion of topics and practice with the worksheets in chapter 4 to be assessed easily by selecting the matching quiz from the following chapter. The remaining two chapters include an optional pretest/posttest in chapter 6, with answer keys to previous materials (from chapters 4 through 6) in chapter 7.

Overall this is a great resource for sports-interested students. This would be a great spring unit in a school, or perhaps a fun summer activity for the kids who are not in school for the summer but need to be actively using their math skills to keep them up to par. All of the needed materials are present to make the workload on the instructor minimal, although it would take a bit of effort to get things started. Once it is going, the weekly tallying of points and tracking of results should be rather minimal for the instructor (the student will spend time reading box scores and calculating points, but if done daily, this should be less than 15 minutes). This is a fun way for sports fans to work on their math skills while keeping up with baseball.