Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Essential reading for all baseball fans., 20 Jul 2006
I have been really lucky this year to have read some fantastic baseball related books. Two of the very best have been Fantasyland, by Sam Walker, and this book. Whilst at first glance it may appear to be a stathead publication, dedicated to the sometimes anal collection and repetition of barely useful trivia and numbers, it is in fact a concise history of the game itself, seen through the eyes of modern day Sabermetricians. In terms of enlightenment about the great game, i would put this up with 'The thinking fans guide to baseball' and 'The Boys of Summer' and the author is to be congratulated on creating a universe of characters, both on the field and off, who come to life with his accurate and witty prose. A Home Run!
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Numbers and what they tell us, 17 Sep 2008
Baseball as a sport lends itself very much to statistics. Although a team game, it boils down to the confrontation of two individuals: the pitcher throws to the batter and one out of a set of defined outcomes occurs (the batter is out, the batter gets on base in one of several defined ways, or the batter fights the pitch off and lives to face another). Each game, then, can be summarised as a series of numbers, and the seasoned baseball fan can run his or her eye over the statistics in the box-score and get a feel for what went on in the game, how it compares to others, and how players compare to each other.
So far, so simple. Let's look at that again though: each game can be summarised as a series of numbers. But which numbers to collect? And which have value in assessing the worth of players? What, indeed, should people be looking for in a player? The search for accurate ways of assessing value is something many fans would associate with recent developments in the game, as summarised in Michael Lewis's justly-celebrated "Moneyball" - the reassessment of batting average as a statistic and its partial replacement by on-base percentage, which finally gave some value to a player's patience and ability to work the pitcher into walking him. In this book, however, Schwarz demonstrates that baseball has been engaged in tinkering with its statistics from the word go: inheriting initial assumptions from cricket score-keeping, the game has fine-tuned what it records ever since in an attempt to come up with accurate measurements of value. Accordingly, Schwarz's book is not "just" a history of the numbers, but something that encourages you to think about the nature of the game and make your own decisions about whether the statistics, over the years, have done the job adequately or not. (My own bugbear is the statistic Runs Batted In, which is chiefly a measurement of how good your team-mates are: I'd nominate that for eviction from the box-score.) It also helps that the stat-heads who, over the years, have contributed to the evolution of the box-score, have tended to be rather eccentric: Schwarz provides lively sketches of these men (always men) as well. A great read for the baseball fan and ideal for the off-season, when one needs a way to chew over the game during the dark winter months. Highly recommended.
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by Zack Hample
by Jim Bouton
by M Lewis
by Jeff Pearlman
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