Baumer is known for his work in sabermetrics, including the bookThe Sabermetric Revolution: Assessing the Growth of Analytics in Baseball withAndrew Zimbalist.[8][5] He was the statistical analyst for theNew York Mets for eight years, between 2004-2012.[9][10] This was shortly after the publication ofMoneyball, 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 themathematics 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 theMassMutual data science initiative, a joint effort withSmith College,Mount Holyoke College, andMassMutual.[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 forDataCamp.[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 severalR packages, including openWAR, a package for analyzing baseball data, and etl, a package for Extract, Transform, Load operations on medium data.[24][25][26]
