I’m a baseball fan, and a baseball researcher. Both interests are represented here.
The team essays are, as in the 1987 edition, focused on the teams; most, frankly, are pretty dull. The Twins essay did a fine job of dissecting their success, though, and a followup essay skewered the notion that the Twinkies were unusually dependent on two pitchers. The Oakland chapter is largely devoted to trying to understand LaRussa’s quirks, which turned out to be an ongoing sabermetric theme. The excellent Cards essay triggered a second excellent essay which used Herzog as an excuse to examine the field manager’s job. And the Astros essay is one of the finest analyses of a team’s season anyone’s written.
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Posted on
May 12th 2012
I originally read Win Shares just after the book was published, then studied it a year or so later when I adapted its framework for a minor league research project. I found that the practical application was really helpful to understanding how the pieces fit together (although, sadly, it didn’t much help my project). This decade-later read benefits from familiarity, now, and from watching other folks apply Bill’s methods. Nonetheless, this is a difficult book.
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Posted on
May 3rd 2012
The book’s enjoyable if you’ve some background in academic statistics, but it’s likely difficult reading if you’ve not encountered that notation and vocabulary. I worked my way through the discussions, but was rummaging through four-decade-old memories from time to time. It’s certainly an essential book if you’re seriously interested in serious baseball analysis.
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Posted on
April 28th 2012
The best stuff is classic. BP published Voros McCracken’s “How Much Control Do Hurlers Have?”, likely the most influential sabermetric essay published in this century; it’s here, as are several author’s reactions. Rany Jazayerli’s delightful, twelve-part exploration of the free agent draft is reproduced as written; it’s fun and informative (though this is one of the places where a the book’s web origins really show; a rewrite would surely make things more coherent). Keith Woolner and James Click explore the areas sabermetrics had not, as of their essays, examined; everyone should read these essays for an overview of the discipline’s landscape. There’s a representative selection of Christina Kahrl’s delightful Transaction Analysis columns; I always looked forward to those. Joe Sheehan, Doug Pappas, Nate Silver, Gary Huckabee, Jonah Keri, and Dayn Perry are all represented; Derek Zumsteg, sad to report, is not.
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Posted on
April 28th 2012
Magical Reality comes to Polish immigrants in early-1950s South Philly. Faith, family, love, and baseball. And a cockroach or twelve.
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Posted on
April 9th 2012
Anyway, the thing which strikes me about Baseball Between the Numbers is that it’s largely grown obsolete in just a half-decade. For almost 20 years, baseball management largely resisted serious statistical analysis. Management largely consisted of former players, and few were inclined to take outside analysis seriously. This was partly willful blindness–”He never played the game”–and partly statistical ignorance. But a generation later, baseball’s management’s (unexpectedly) become more businesslike, and a newer generation of baseball players–and coaches and field managers–includes a sprinkling of folks who grew up reading James, Pete Palmer, or authors influenced by James and Palmer. Some of those players have moved to front office jobs. And while fans still have blind spots, they’re generally more aware that many numbers are influenced by ballpark and batting order, and that there are legitimate reasons to debate baseball’s accepted wisdom.
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Life's Stories
Posted on
March 30th 2012
Mark Lazarus takes a look at the defensive support received by major league pitchers, as measured by error rates. He’s aware of, and discusses, the weaknesses in this analytical method. Nonetheless, this study turned out to be far more interesting than I expected. The anomalies reported in the data are especially interesting. This topic deserves more study. Not sure that I’ve seen such a work.
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Posted on
March 30th 2012
Bill James’ introductory note takes delight in the fact that two of these are followups on articles in earlier editions. Sabermetrics was a new field, back then, and the practitioners needed to cross-pollinate; Bill’s Analyst was a way to make that happen.
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Posted on
March 14th 2012
The player essays, written by volunteers who had obviously been watching the guy, were often glorious. Scott Segrin pointed out that the Brewers habit of always moving Paul Molitor likely contributed to his injury and playing time problems. Dennis Bretz offered a delightful portrait of an aging Reggie Jackson. Michael O’Donnell took a peek at Barry Bonds’ rookie season, and speculated about his future. Merrianna McCully used Dick Williams as a lens to examine Ken Phelps. Craig Wright reminded us how good Oddibe McDowell looked when he arrived in Arlington. Geoff Beckman differed with Dan Okrent about Cecil Cooper. Each essay’s a half page, with is long enough for an extended comment but too short for a full-blown essay. Not all of these are excellent, of course, but enough are to justify working through them. Even now, 26 years later.
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Posted on
March 2nd 2012
I rather expected the book to begin with an overview of the place scouting occupies in the typical baseball organization, with other chapters explicitly discussing the history and development of scouting practice, the role scouting plays in player development (and perhaps some discussion of how specific organizations have employed different scouting/player development strategies), and an explication of the things scouts look for when they watch a baseball game. The book contains all of that material, at least in part, but only the “what do they look” for part has a specific discussion, and that is tucked into a rather brief chapter introduction. The other general topics can be gleaned from the book’s material, but at best there are only partial summaries.
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Posted on
February 20th 2012
