prone to enthusiasms….
I’m a baseball fan, and a baseball researcher. Both interests are represented here.
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This is a largely descriptive, extremely chronological examination of the evolution of managerial roles, and of tactical and strategic developments, over the history of professional baseball. Each decade gets a chapter; each chapter consists of an overview, detailed portraits of a handful of historically-important managers, anecdotes about interesting events, and an occasional topical essay.
Filed under
Baseball CrankSpace
Bookworm Alley
Posted on
August 19th 2011
But it’s a shallow book. There’s not much analysis, despite the title. You can sometimes see that real analysis has been done, but the presentation hides the work. The clear attitude is “Take our word for it, we’ve crunched the numbers.” Lots of us aren’t happy with that sort of presentation; but hey, it’s their book, they can do that if they want. But saying we can’t complain about it is a little unreasonable.
Filed under
Baseball CrankSpace
Bookworm Alley
Posted on
August 12th 2011
As James notes near the end of the book, this edition of the Abstract is the most technical book he’d produced to date. 1985 is the year Bill brought Major League Equivalencies of minor league players into Sabermetric discourse; comments are scattered throughout the text but the key discussion’s in the Dodgers section. Several of the team writeups were composed by Project Scoresheet participants, which lent some variety; in all cases, Bill added come critical comments. Strangely, Jim Baker seems not to have written any of the book, though he was still in James’ employ and is credited for some of the quoted research.
Filed under
Baseball CrankSpace
Bookworm Alley
Posted on
June 27th 2011
This is both a history of the Baseball Hall of Fame and an examination of the apparent standards used by the voting populaces, with a lot of asides. The history is solid, and covers both the institutional side (how the Hall and museum came to be built, maintained, and ruled) and the election of the players (and others) who are honored there.
Filed under
Baseball CrankSpace
Bookworm Alley
Posted on
June 11th 2011
The best Baseball Abstract so far, partly because he hired an assistant (Jim Baker) who could assume part of the writing load. This edition’s largely about the things managers do, though of course there are excursions in other topics on nearly every page. There’s also a lot of discussion of “Victory Important RBIs” that I have difficulty taking seriously.
Filed under
Baseball CrankSpace
Bookworm Alley
Posted on
May 25th 2011
Part of the fun with these is knowing how things worked out. He predicted the O’s imminent demise, but probably missed by a year (he expected 1983, but hedged his bets. His evolving understandings of, say, Dennis Eckersley is intriguing. He’s absolutely nasty about Sparky Anderson, which probably (or partially) explains Anderson’s low opinion of James’ work.
Filed under
Baseball CrankSpace
Bookworm Alley
Posted on
May 13th 2011
In general, this book is not as good as I remembered. It’s still very good, though, and an important sabermetric standard. Fewer numbers in here than in Bill James or Pete Palmer, but the perspective is much like James’.
Filed under
Baseball CrankSpace
Bookworm Alley
Posted on
May 4th 2011
The 11/29/1940 Dallas Evening News (my thanks to GenealogyBank) tells me that R.H. Johnson’s military career mostly occurred during WWI, as an enlisted man in Artillery, which was before his West Point stint. At the USMA he was quite active in sports, including baseball; he captained the basketball team. Johnson subsequently served for a few years as a ROTC instructor in the NYC area before resigning his commission to enter the banking business on Wall Street. In 1929 he founded R.H. Johnson & Company, and in 1947 began Franklin Investments.
Filed under
Baseball CrankSpace
History Scrapbook
Posted on
April 18th 2011
This is a well-researched history of baseball’s origins. Baseball wasn’t really invented, of course, but Thorn makes a good case that certain individuals were very important to its development as an institution. This is, in one sense, obvious; what’s perhaps less obvious is who some of those individuals actually were. This part of the book is well-done and, on the whole, convincing.
Filed under
Baseball CrankSpace
Bookworm Alley
History Scrapbook
Posted on
April 18th 2011
One thing that’s obvious is James’ dependence on inadequate tools. Box scores just don’t have enough information to answer the questions he’s asking. That need will lead, ultimately, to Project Scoresheet, to STATS, to Baseball Information Solutions, to Retrosheet. But in 1981 none of these existed.
Filed under
Baseball CrankSpace
Bookworm Alley
Posted on
April 16th 2011
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