A Surprise Book in the Mail!

I've been on a roll lately getting caught up on mail packages and I'm going to try and continue that positive momentum today with a surprise mailing from blog reader Michael P.  Michael reached out to me on Facebook quite awhile back asking if I had read a certain book.  I replied I had not and that was basically the end of the conversation...until a few days later when this showed up in my mailbox:

That's a book that combines my love of mathematics with my love of baseball - and it's perfect!  

The college where I work at added baseball as a collegiate sport beginning this year and so I've considered trying to offer a version of our Introduction to Statistics course with an emphasis on baseball.  I have another baseball-themed statistics book that I acquired many years ago but Baseball Between the Numbers appears to have even more cool stuff that I could see using in an introductory stats class.

For example, I flipped to a random page and found this:

There's tons of stuff you can do in an intro stats course with that one table!  I'm no statistician but I do love baseball so I think that this could be a rather fun course (at least as fun as any intro stats class can be).  I have no idea when/if I'll ever be able to fit such a course into my teaching schedule but when/if I do, you can bet that I'll make use of this book.  

Until then, it looks like I have some more reading - more books to add to my to-read list!  

Many thanks to Michael once again for the wonderfully generous gift.  It's quite humbling to have people across the internet who I've never met think of me and then send me something they think I'll enjoy.  There's a lot of bad news out there in the world but at least our little corner of the internet is generally full of great people who love to make other people's day - and for that, I appreciate both Michael as well as all my other blog readers (yes, even those who've never sent me anything)!