Baseball Between the Numbers review
Disclaimer: while I haven’t been involved with Baseball Prospectus for a year and change, I used to be. I know some of the people who wrote chapters. Jonah Keri, who edited this book, is a friend of USSM (and mine). So this review is totally biased and unreliable. More than usual.
For instance, “How much is a player worth?†is discussed in “Is Alex Rodriguez Overpaid?†by Nate Silver. In it, Silver goes through what a win is worth to a team, how a win can be worth more or less to one franchise compared to another, and how a win can be worth more or less to the same franchise depending on where they are, why it can make sense for a team to overpay, how the Winner’s Curse effects player valuation, finally wrapping back around to “yeah, that was way too much money.â€Â
That, of course, ignores the scarcity argument, which is odd, since the chapters on replacement level do a good job of explaining that there are many scrubs and only one Alex Rodriguez. It’s a glaring omission, but as a straight “how much is so many wins worth to a team?†discussion, it’s informative and interesting.
Silver has three other really good chapters. The introductory “Is Barry Bonds Better Than Babe Ruth†is a long walk down how we can use performance metrics to compare players across wildly different eras. “Is David Ortiz a clutch hitter?†features a novel way to think about what clutch means. “What Do Statistics Tell Us About Steroids?†treads carefully, and we find:
– unexpected performance changes are historically common
– overall, steroid use seems to have a small, noticeable performance impact
To go along with things we knew (few players are or were steroid users, it’s much more marginal players using than stars).
The other chapters are a lot like those. If you’ve read the Baseball Prospectus annuals, it’s like having 400 pages of the back-of-the-book essays. There’s a ton of meat to chew on. Or if you remember the “Baseball Prospectus Basics†series of articles they (well, me too) wrote attempting to answer basic questions, it’s many of those issues blown up and done in great depth. For example I did “How to run a bullpen†and here Woolner writes a far better chapter on “Are Teams Letting Their Closer Go to Waste?†which goes so far as to attempt to answer the question of when it’s worth taking the risk of putting a pitcher in, not knowing what’ll happen later or tomorrow.
The book does a good job of attacking these topics in chunks that are substantial but not too weighty.
Other standout chapters from my first reading:
“Is Joe Torre a Hall of Fame Manager?†James Click attempts to define how a manager can help (or, as it turns out, least hurt) his team. The results are a little shocking. Lou Piniella, for instance, turns up in the “Best Manager Seasons by Strategic Decisions, 1972-2004†table (for 2001 with Seattle, and 2003 with Tampa) and in the “Worst†table (Seattle 1993).
Neil deMause has three in a row (“Do High Salaries Lead to High Ticket Prices?†“Are New Stadiums a Good Deal?†and “Does Baseball Need a Salary Cap?â€Â) that make me want to take this book with me when I go watch games in local watering holes (“Here, read 207-214 and get back to me. Don’t leave with the book.â€Â).
“Do Players Perform Better in Contract Years?†by Dayn Perry comes to the conclusion that yeah, they do, but the perception also stems from age-related decline, as most free agents are in their thirties. That there is an effect, though, raises a whole other issue – if we accept it’s true that players can have better years for reasons unrelated to normal influences like park, age, and so on, isn’t this the best argument to look into chemistry ever? If a player can perform significantly better through better focus, or workouts, or whatever they’re doing that year, shouldn’t teams hunt this down and spend whatever it takes to figure out how to better motivate their players, be that the manager, the coaches, the color of the clubhouse, even the psychological profiles of their teammates? That’s huge!
James Click’s chapter on when one-run strategies make sense (almost never, and certainly not when we’ve been told they do), “When Is One Run Worth More Than Two?†shocked me a little when I finally got far enough into it.
There’s also a really nice glossary of stat terms in the back that runs about twenty pages. People ask me all the time to point them to a good explanation of this stuff, and generally I point them to ESPN, or BP’s increasingly comprehensive one, but if you want something to keep by the desk for clear, readable explanations, it’s your book.
There are only two serious downsides to the book:
– A lot of it’s dry. You may wish to get some decent coffee before you sit down for some of these chapters. There’s a lot of stats talk in some chapters that’ll weigh heavily on your eyelids. A couple times in reading it, I said “I’ll take your word for it, Keith, I trust you,†and skimmed ahead (or whoever). Now, it’s necessary to get you to the fairly shocking stuff, but I want to be clear: you’re not going to read this in one sitting.
– If you’ve obsessively kept up on baseball research over the last couple of years, there’s not a great deal here that’s new or shocking. But if that’s you, the stuff that’s going to seem dry to the newly introduced is, and even when they walk through the current view on pitcher effects on balls in play it’s well-down as it follows the evolution of an argument into a better understanding of the way baseball works.
Rob Neyer’s “Rob Neyer’s Big Book of Baseball Lineups
Check it out.
Sunday spring training news
Gil Meche is out indefinately with a strained oblique muscle.
News Tribune goodness:
Dobbs, Morse getting into swing of things
Ichiro auditions for lead role
Sunday is the Seattle Times day, as the PI guys (I presume) get to relax under the terms of the joint publishing agreement:
– Foppert!
– Kazu Sasaki’s a baseball analyst now
Update: M’s got stomped by the Padres again.