Book Review: Baseball Between the Numbers
May 6, 2006 by alex
This book, written by the stat-heads over at Baseball Prospectus is an awesome, speedy, read for anyone who’s a fan of the game and likes to debate its many idiosyncracies - those debates that can often sidetrack and entire group’s conversation against their will. The BP guys are often criticized for being too stat-focused and while there are certainly a lot of statistics throughout the book, they avoid falling victim to their own numbers. When the numbers feel like a little much, you can always just focus on the prose, which do a great job of presenting those numbers in the context of a more easily digestible narrative.
Chapters I really enjoyed were “Is David Ortiz a Clutch Hitter?”, “Five Pitchers or Four? On Pitching and Stamina”, “Is Wayne Huizenga a Genius?”, “When is One Run Worth More Than Two?”, “Do Players Perform Better in Contract Years?”, “Why Doesn’t Billy Beane’s Shit Work in the Playoffs?” and “What Do Statistics Tell Us About Steroids?”. There are a bunch more along similar lines - touching upon the issues that baseball fans often find themselves arguing about, many of them addressing to relationship between those that follow the numbers and those that follow their gut. I highly recommend this book to any baseball fan out there who’s prone to nerding out every once in a while about baseball’s minutiae.
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