December 22, 2004

What I am Reading:

The Hardball Times Baseball Annual

I am just finishing up my Hardball Times Baseball Annual.  Here’s what I think:

For openers, they avoided putting a player on the front, so as not to jinx anyone.  I’m sure Aaron Gleeman really wanted Johan Santana on there, but that could have proved disastrous.  The physical book, in case you only bought the e-book, looks pretty much like every other annual.  That’s not a criticism – I think it is a good thing.  It will stack easily with them and I already have the shelves in my baseball office set so it will hold this edition, and all future ones, neatly.

What about the contents?

The book has a dozen new pieces, covering each division, as a division, in a review and a playoff review, written by Larry Mahnken.  I’m sure the assignments were made early on, so Larry, a Yankee fan, had the bitter task of writing about the Red Sox comeback and subsequent victory.  This differed from annuals you may be used to, with divisional reviews rather than team-by-team reviews.  Each division had two pages (or slightly more) of writing and each was accompanied by race graphs.  The graphs were very nice and a significant improvement on most annuals.

Other than basic reviews, there were six other pieces in the book of new material for the book.  Two of these pieces stand out for me: Craig Burley’s article on college baseball in 2004 and Robert Dudek’s research piece on defensive analysis based on the hang time of a ball-in-play.

Craig Burley has developed some incredible analysis on college baseball that was first published at BattersBox.ca.  It is significant groundbreaking work, and Burley’s write-up of the 2004 college baseball season, and player rankings is an excellent piece of work.  I have a minimal working knowledge of college baseball, and Burley’s article was very clearly written and very enlightening.  Burley should win an award for the deciphering of college statistics.

Dudek’s piece explored defense by the amount of time a ball was in the air for outfielders.  This has been something of a Holy Grail for defensive work since the early days of rec.sport.baseball and The Baseball Workshop’s data gathering and analysis.  Using MLB.com’s video archives, Dudek and his team of researchers reviewed the games pitched by a set of pitchers, using a stopwatch to time the length of time a ball was in the air.  The work is small-scale, and I’m not sure how well the data will all work, but actually figuring out how to do this, and then to run the analysis is excellent work.  It is compelling and I look forward to more analysis along these lines.

Burley also wrote a review of the Japanese baseball season.  It was short and sweet.  I don’t recall any other annual covering this at all, so while I am largely ignorant of the league’s specifics, Burley summarized the simpler points, including standings and leaders.  Did you know that in Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) games are a maximum of 12 innings, so games can end in ties?  Perhaps Selig was channeling Sadaharu Oh when he called the All-Star Game a few years ago.

Ben Jacobs wrote a very short piece on fantasy players, summarizing who were the most valuable fantasy players and who were the worst.  It only summarized, with no future outlook.  I don’t think anyone will be relying on it for this anyway.

Two pieces were particularly lacking.  The playoffs and World Series could have been punched up a bit.  For the surreal victory that was a Red Sox World Series Championship, the article was relatively passionless.  There were nine sentences written on the World Series games themselves.  For a review annual, I want more on the World Series, particularly if it’s the first Red Sox victory in 86 years.

The Minor League Review was incorrectly titled.  It roughly had the same requirements as Burley’s college piece, but didn’t make transitions very well.  There wasn’t any particular pattern to the write-up that I could tell.  It wasn’t organized by level or team.  It actually was a top prospect review, I suppose, rather than a Minor League review, simply capturing how the best prospects had performed.

There were another two dozen articles considered “Best of” from the website.  Alex Belth’s piece on the New Orleans Winter Meetings from the previous season (which had been on Bronx Banter) is still a good read.  At the end of most of the pieces, there is a sentence or two updating the article.  One of the more prescient articles is Aaron Gleeman’s May 7 article on Carlos Beltran “Making the Leap”.  In light of how the season played out, Gleeman really made good in this piece.

Then comes my favorite part of the book: the stats.  The book is approximately 300 pages long, and 175 of them are stats.  I love stats.  I love the raw data, so I can do with them what I want.  The book has the stats broken into team sections, and there are graphs (this is a Studes production, after all).

I think the best stat in the book is double plays started and double plays turned.  Can you even imagine?  Have you ever seen that stat available anywhere?

The stat pages also has Fielding-Independent Pitching and DER for individual pitchers, as well as RA average.

The book has just tons of stats – Win Shares, Runs Created Above Average, Batter-faced Outcomes for pitchers.

There’s just more than I can describe.  It’s a treasure trove for a stat-junkie.  I may have organized a few things differently, and I would pick the nit that listing the average performance at each position would be very helpful, but really I have no complaints.  I am very grateful that for the truckload of statistics that the Hardball Times crew put together.

One other critique – it is a season review.  However, the awards are not included.  While it was very nice to get access to the book a week after the World Series ended, this would be a significantly better annual with the awards and a historical listing of the awards. 

All in all, it is worth much more than the $17 (or so) I paid for it, and it won’t be like so many other annuals on my bookshelf – never to be opened again after that first off-season.  Because of the stats in the book, the Hardball Times first annual will be a reference book for me – I mean, double plays started?  Wow.

Road Trips

On of the best things about being a SABR member is the odd flow of publications that come my way.  There is the Baseball Research Journal and The National Pastime, as well as the Statistical Committee’s “By The Numbers”, put together by Phil Birnbaum and the Business of Baseball’s newsletter “Outside the Lines”.  Every now and then another publication shows up.

Recently I received “Road Trips – A Trunkload of Great Articles from Two Decades of Convention Journals”.  These articles are from when a convention was held in a given town.  While I’m still reading through, a particular article by Bob Buege entitled, “The Birth of the American League” was extremely engaging.  Evidently, the AL was founded in Milwaukee.  The account is very detailed and speaks about the daily events performed by Charles Comiskey, Ban Johnson and the Killilea brothers. 

It’s an intriguing bit of research and just the tip of the iceberg in this book.

With that, I want to urge each of you to consider joining SABR – it just offers so much.  At a minimum, you should go to the site and see what it offers you.

Ted Williams

Bruce Markusen recently wrote his contribution to Greenwood Press’ series on “Baseball’s All-Time Greatest Hitters”.  He was kind enough to send me a copy.  I’m still reading, but so far, very good.  Markusen uses resources very well and endnotes his references, whether it is another Williams bio, a speech at the Hall of Fame or Sport magazine.  In addition to writing the story himself, he allows me to read more in a better presentation than I have read in other Williams’ biographies.  That may not seem like much, but it is something I appreciate.

More on this book when I finish.