Benjamin Baumer | |
---|---|
Born | |
Citizenship | American |
Alma mater | Wesleyan University (BA) University of California, San Diego (MA) City University of New York (PhD) |
Spouse | Cory Mescon |
Scientific career | |
Fields | |
Institutions | Smith College |
Thesis | (2012) |
Benjamin Strong Baumer is a statistician and sabermetrician. He is a professor of statistical and data sciences at Smith College, and was formerly the statistical analyst for the New York Mets.
Baumer grew up in Northampton, Massachusetts. [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 a Bachelor of Arts in economics from Wesleyan University, and his masters in applied mathematics from the University of California, San Diego. [5] [6] He completed a PhD at the City University of New York. [6]
Baumer is married to Cory Mescon, a public defender. [2] [7]
Baumer is known for his work in sabermetrics, including the book The Sabermetric Revolution: Assessing the Growth of Analytics in Baseball with Andrew Zimbalist. [8] [5] He was the statistical analyst for the New York Mets for eight years, between 2004-2012. [9] [10] This was shortly after the publication of Moneyball, so the use of statistical analysis in baseball was still a new field. [9]
Since leaving the Mets, Baumer has been a professor at Smith College. Upon arrival at Smith, he taught in the mathematics department. [10] He was instrumental in the development of Smith's program in statistical and data sciences, and is now appointed in that program. [11] The program is one of the first undergraduate majors in data science in the United States, and the first at a women's college. [12] [13] 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. [14] [15]
Baumer has written a textbook for use in data science courses, Modern Data Science with R. [16] [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]
Baumer received the 2016 Contemporary Baseball Analysis Award. [27] His project, The Great Analytics Rankings, was nominated for a 2015 EPPY award. [28] He was elected to the 2025 class of Fellows of the American Statistical Association. [29]