Books
Books
Saturday, May 04, 2013
?Before I say my one cent, I should say something important, and that is that the 1986 Baseball Abstract is available at Amazon Marketplace for under 10$ including shipping. I count twelve separate sellers, and I'd suggest that any follower of sabermetrics should buy this book right now.
Anyway, back to my one cent. I think the simplest application of what sabremetrics DOES is when Bill James tackled the "is baseball 75% pitching", and he goes out and demonstrates that we don't see any evidence of it, nor does anyone actually behave as if it is. It is, in essence, a summary opinion with no evidence, and sabremetrics basically exposes bullsh!t just as much as it highlights insights. In the aforementioned book, Bill has a very long article on the topic, and I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that that article may have been the one that crystallized for me exactly what sabermetrics was all about:
"No pitcher allows home runs as often as Dale Murphy hits home runs. No pitcher allows home runs as seldom as Bob Dernier hits home runs. . .No pitcher allows hits as often as Wade Boggs gets hits. No pitcher, not even Dwight Gooden, allows hits as infrequently as Steve Lake will get a hit. . .No pitcher strikes out hitters as often as Rob Deer strikes out. No pitcher strikes out hitters as rarely as Bill Buckner strikes out.
"This is true of every significant area of performance, including those things like walks and hit batsmen, which are usually considered to be controlled by the pitcher. And what does that mean? It means that in order to create a working model or simulation of a baseball game, you must allow the hitters to be the dominant, shaping force in the game. And if baseball were 75% pitching, one would not expect that to be true."
What is sabremetrics? It challenges you to form your thoughts into a hypothesis, which you can then test, and you test it by finding evidence. Sabremetrics requires that you start with a question.
If you already have the answer, and no amount of evidence will change your conclusion, if new data doesn't alter your thinking, then you have no use for sabermetrics.
(11)
Comments
• 2013/05/06
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Books
Monday, April 08, 2013
Ron Kaplan has compiled a list of 501 baseball books to read.? They are in alphabetical order, and in category order, which is a fine choice. If you are interested in "analysis", then you'll see a manageable list for you to make up your own mind as to the next one to try out. I put in my favorite books/authors to see if Kaplan had it. The first one that didn't make it was Heylar's Lords of the Realm, which is a behind-the-scenes history book. Kaplan DOES acknowledge the book as "excellent" in a passage of some other book, but he doesn't have it in his list of 501. He even had a niche book like Panas' Beyond Batting Average (which I'd recommend to anyone starting out in sabermetrics). He also put BPRo's Between the Numbers in the "statistics" section, which I think it should be in the "analysis" section. But, those are little things that are hard to agree upon when you go with single categories (though he does show "other categories").
(By the way, Amazon's Look Inside does show a hit for: Lords of the Realm, but it does not show a hit for: Heylar, even though those two key terms are one line apart. Weird.)
Anyway, I'd love to hear from your guys as to books that you liked, but Kaplan didn't show.
(2)
Comments
• 2013/04/08
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Books
Saturday, March 09, 2013
?God-damn I love Phil.
My favorite part is when he looks at what Peta should have won, with Peta's presumed odds, and what his actual return was in each of those slices. And:
I ran a simulation to confirm, and, yes, it seems to work out. If I move every edge three-quarters of the way back to even -- that is, regress 75 percent to the mean -- I get almost the same bottom line Peta did... In that light, Peta's +29 percent is about 2 SD above random.
Which could very well be publication bias. SOMEONE out there is going to be 2 SD above the mean. And if that someone is willing to write a book, well then great!
This reminds me of those old "free hotlines", where they give you three teams that will beat the odds. Well, what they did was setup 8 hotlines for each combination of those three games. They'd publish 8 different phone numbers, one in each of 8 newspapers. Whoever ended up calling the right number, well, congratulations, you've found yourself a new customer. He's happy, because it's house money as far he's concerned.
I have no idea if Peta was successful because he's good, or because he's lucky, or some combination of the two.
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Comments
• 2013/10/18
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Books
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Forecasting
Thursday, February 28, 2013
The book is out. First few comments? from the readers talks about the change in team essays, also echoed over at Amazon. And here's Will Leitch talking about the changes at BPro. Feel free to post your comments below.
Saturday, February 23, 2013
?Phil Birnbaum gives us a primer that should be a starting point for anyone out there. Just choose something on the table of contents sidebar, and go.
(3)
Comments
• 2013/02/23
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Books
Monday, February 04, 2013
Make your annual five dollar donation to Fangraphs to say "thank you", and get ?plenty of "you are welcome" gifts from the good group of analysts there. I think it's obvious that David has done more than anyone to making wOBA, FIP and other things I've dabbled in as ubiquitous as possible, not to mention the other 99% of the things that make his site great, and you should do your best to show your appreciation to what David is doing over there. It's really insane that he does all that he does without charging subscription fees, and yet paying his writers.
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