Baseball Prospectus

If you ever wanted to scratch the surface of advance statistical study of baseball, this is the first book I'd start with. Not a straight cover to cover book, but rather a grouping of essays about a variety of topics. They range from the humorous but thought provoking "What if Rickey Henderson had Pete Incavilia's legs?" to the argument inducing "Did Derek Jeter deserve the Gold Glove". Some essays can gloss over the eyeballs with the depth of statistical information, but the vast majority show more keep it interesting enough to rope in the more casual fan. show less

Many legitimate and some non-obvious observations are painstakingly established here. But, there is a rather significant caveat: This book almost seems designed for the purpose of making you better appreciate Bill James: it's badly written.

Bill James should not just have been a figure to be acknowledged in the preface--his brevity and clarity should have served as a model for the Baseball Prospectus team.

Instead we get interminable lead-ins to simple and already well-known concepts like show more park factor. Other themes are ironically obscured by the authors "too much is never enough" approach to evidence and graphic depictions thereof.

The Baseball Prospectus team never establishes any kind of rapport with their readers. Where James makes you feel like he's engaging you in a bar-room conversation in baseball Valhalla, Baseball Prospectus makes you feel like a professor reading a rather interesting but unfortunately ham-handed term paper. show less

BP is one of the things I 'discovered' after my re-introduction to baseball, and whew am I glad. These folks demonstrated to me that sports writing could just be ... good WRITING. Plus they lean toward the sardonic and, to tell the truth, very very funny. That's a plus.

This is a big, sprawling, two-volume book which offers a "best-of" selection from the Baseball Prospectus website. The work is generally of very high quality, and is well-organized, but the website origins of the essays occasionally cause some orientation issues. Moreover, the selection was deliberately biased toward more recent writings, apparently because the editors believe the context has rendered much of the older analysis obsolete--a belief I share, by the way.

The best stuff is show more classic. BP published Voros McCracken's "How Much Control Do Hurlers Have?" early in 2001, which is likely the most influential sabermetric essay published in this century; it's here, as are several author's reactions. Rany Jazayerli's delightful, twelve-part exploration of the free agent draft is reproduced as written; it's fun and informative (though this is one of the places where a the book's web origins really show; a rewrite would surely make things more coherent). Keith Woolner and James Click explore the areas sabermetrics had not, as of their essays, examined; everyone should read these essays for an overview of the discipline's landscape. There's a representative selection of Christina Kahrl's delightful Transaction Analysis columns; I always looked forward to those. Besides the current staff, Joe Sheehan, Doug Pappas, Nate Silver, Gary Huckabee, Jonah Keri, and Dayn Perry are all represented; Derek Zumsteg, sad to report, is not.

The first volume's largely about the game itself, often (but hardly exclusively) from a sabermetric perspective; the second volume could be said to be about the business side of the sport. Both are worth reading; both are often fun. A good book.





This review has also been published on a dabbler's journal. show less