Tag Archives: elias analyst

The 1987 Elias Baseball Analyst by Seymour Siwoff, Steve Hirdt, & Peter Hirdt: a review

The best piece of research in the book is the Cleveland essay, where they discover that teams who win from far behind (rallies of five or more runs) are fairly likely to win the next game they play, but virtually certain to lose the fifth game after the comeback win. They offer, and dismiss, the pitching rotation as an explanation. This just screams for a followup study; I don’t know that it’s ever been done.

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The 1986 Elias Baseball Analyst: a review

Far better than the first edition. The text portion of this book consists entirely of team essays, most of which are surprisingly playful investigations of issues raised by the team’s season or the team’s players. They are also more open about their methods in this volume. The best of these are quite fine.

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1985 Elias Baseball Analyst: a review

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.

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