The Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2006

The new and second yearly The Hardball Times Baseball Annual, edited by Aaron Gleeman and Dave "Studes" Studenmund is a flat-out excellent baseball book that's dang near required reading for anyone who considers his/herself to be a serious fan. About 90% of the articles – written by not only THT stalwarts such as Gleeman, Brian Borawski, et al, but also by special guests (most notably Bill James) - are well worth reading. That's a heckuva success rate. It's amazing that they succeeded in getting this book ready for publication within a month of the postseason's end and still managed to pull off such a high quality product. Put together by the makers of the Hardballtimes.com website, it generally succeeds in analyzing baseball from a sabermetric point of view, yet still being accessible to a wider audience. It has an interesting little niche for itself. Instead of gearing itself more towards fantasy players and trying to predict the upcoming season, it centers itself on multi-page articles analyzing various aspects of the game, and looks backwards on the recently completed season.

The structure of the book saves the more rigorous statistical information for the latter sections and begins with considerably less number-centric stuff, which is likely a good move if you want to appeal to those beyond the existing stathead community. Aside from a brief intro by Gleeman, the book consists of five sections. The first three sections – a review of the 2005 season, commentary on baseball in 2005, and historical studies – take up the first 130 pages, and though they all discuss and utilize sabermetric methods, they're not nearly as stat intensive as the last two sections. The fourth section – Analysis – primarily consists of hardcore sabermetric analysis of various questions and issues. The fifth section, simply Statistics, takes up almost half the book.

Going section by section . . .

Section 1: The 2005 season

This section consists of eight articles – six division reviews, a post-season review, and a "Ten Things I Learned This Year" article by Studes. The "Ten Things" article kicks things off. If you're familiar with his weekly in-season column "Ten Things I Learned This Week" you should know what to expect here. It's a good mix of amusing observations and information and does a good job setting up the book's themes by discussing off-field issues (the steroids controversy, the business of baseball), stats (one of his "Ten Things" is titled "Baseball statistics are growing up"), the game itself (items on the White Sox, Astros, divisions, etc), along with occasional dashes of random but interesting info (the blurbs in gray boxes that dot the article). All these elements appear throughout the rest of the book.

After Studes's opening salvo, the book delves into the different divisions; first AL, then NL, going East-Central-West in both leagues. Each divisional entry begins with an eye- catching graph which shows where each team stood in relation to .500 all year long. It's a nice, reader-friendly way to quickly note how each race went. Want to know when the Mariners settled into last? Or trace the Padres' fight with .500? It's right there for you to look at. The only problem is that when two teams finish tied (as the Mets and Marlins did, to cite one example) there's no way of really knowing which team's graph is which, unless one already knew how the division race went (in which case you wouldn't need the graph as much in the first place).

Following these graphs are articles – 2 ½ to 3 ½ pages in length – covering each division race, and seasons for the teams. Though most authors prioritize giving attention to the race for the division crown, they manage to spend at least a few paragraphs on every team in the division. The one exception to this is Aaron Gleeman's article on the AL Central. Gleeman gets so caught up in describing the attempts by, and hopes of the Twins, White Sox, and Indians to win the division, that he never manages to say much at all about Detroit or KC. You think he could at least get an easy paragraph of cheap jokes at the Royals' expense.

As mentioned, the main focus of these articles tends to be the division race, and how it unfolded throughout the season. Divisions with the more remarkable races – such as the AL West where the A's big push fell short, and the AL Central where the White Sox very nearly blew the biggest lead in baseball history – get the most focus. Divisions without much of a race, such as the NL Central, reasonably enough don't focus on the non-race. Steve Treder's article on the NL West has an unusual, but fitting, main theme. The focus here isn't on the divisional race, but more on just what an unrelentingly bad division it was, perhaps the most putrid division in baseball history. Treder concludes by joking that this flock of teams was so historically putrid that the term "2005 NL West" may enter the lexicon for ineptitude.

In general, these articles are very good, and you get a really nice sense of how the season progressed in each division, as well as the pros and cons of each team. In five of the six divisional articles you get your money's worth of information and analysis. In five of the six.

The remaining piece, Greg Tamer's piece on the NL Central, is the least informative article in the entire book. On the bright side, this article does give some good analysis of the Astros. I did find his digging on their turnaround to be interesting, but the rest of the piece wasn't up to par. This was one of the first articles in the book I read, and I finished this piece thinking that maybe I shouldn't have bought the book. Based solely on what this article, one could reasonably assume that Tamer either didn't follow the division at all (or was an Astros fan), and conducted his research here while waiting for a potato to bake in the microwave. The next paragraph is a brief summary of non-Houston sections of this article:

Here are the ERA+s and IP for pitchers with an ERA+ over 100. They had good years. Here are the same stats for pitchers with ERA+s under 100. They had bad years. Here's the PA and OPS+ for hitters with OPS+s over 100. They had good years. Now for the same stats for batters with OPS+s under 100. They had bad year. Here's one or two other random facts about the club. Now to repeat this process for the next team. And the next team. And the next. Until the reader vomits from boredom.

After them comes a review of the postseason written by the book's editors. It's a fantastic synopsis of October. It goes series by series (first divisional, then league championship, and finally the World Series). For the Astros-White Sox showdown, the authors go into intensive game-by-game analysis while the other series get considerably briefer treatment. About half of this nine-page article ends up dealing with the sweep of Houston, a reasonable allotment of space given its importance.

The highlight of the article are a series of graphs (I assume put together by Graph Man himself, Studes) showing what the eventual winning team's chances of winning the game were in terms of Win Probability Added, in which they calculate how every play of the series affected the course of the overall game. They present such graphs for three play- off games, and all four World Series games, and it's terrific stuff that let's you see how big some of the plays were. To make the graphs easier to follow they tell you what the biggest dips and rises are. They graph out the Pujols HR game against Houston, and you can visualize how desperate the Cards' situation was before Eckstein eked a single off of Brad Lidge, and what a huge shot Pujols hit. In one swing the Cards went from having less than an 8% chance of winning than greater than 80% chance. The graphs of the World Series show just how tight the games were, and how despite the fact that it was a sweep, the games themselves were always contested.

The analysis and commentary that make up the bulk of the article are also solid as they discuss all the major moments from all the important games. Clemens's heroics vs. Atl, the Angels sleep deprivation upon arriving in Chicago, Josh Paul-gate – it's all in here. Years from now when one wants to check back and remember what happened in any of the post-season, this will make a fine resource to refresh a hazy memory. The same can be said for the first section as a whole.

Section 2: 2005 Commentary

This part was, for me, the highlight of the book. It consists of 11 articles, all of them winners. Each of them discusses and analyzes a different aspect of baseball. Some discuss off-field issues, while others on-field items, but all are well worth reading.

The best of the bunch, and my own personal favorite article in the entire book, is John Brattain's discussion on the steroids controversyl. Personally, I usually loathe discussions on steroids because they tend to quickly degenerate into shrill, dogmatic feces-flinging contests. Here, unlike virtually everything else I've read on the subject, is a thoughtful, reasonable article on this most controversial of baseball subjects. He never gets testy, or holier-than-thou towards any point of view on the matter. This does not mean he engages in some middling "morally neutral" attitude, as he definitely does have and present his own perspective on the matter. In short, he argues that placing the entire public onus on the players is no more appropriate than absolving Charles Comiskey of any wrongdoing during 1919, and that Bonds is still one of the greatest players ever no matter what he took. It's a steroids article I was actually glad I read, and that's a sensation I don't recall having before.

That was not the only article that surprised me by how much I liked it. I can pay one of the highest compliments I can give to the articles by Brian Borawski and Maury Brown on the business of baseball: they took a subject I normally find as interesting as watching paint dry and made me glad I read it. Borawski reviews the year that was in baseball, while Brown – in one of the only forward-looking articles in this book that reviews of the '05 season – tries to forecast the possible battles over the upcoming 2006 CBA. Borawski, among other things, does a very nice job going over the comedy of errors that is MLB's attempt to sell the Washington Nationals, and secure a stadium deal for them. He gives a good blow-by-blow account of the various factors, and problems that keep stopping things from moving forward, all while MLB continues to set, reset, and reset again their timetable for taking care of this situation. He spends over half the article on this one issue, which seems right given its importance. The rest of the article discusses the name follies of the Angels, ownership changes throughout baseball, stadium development deals and plans, and baseball's record setting year in attendance.

Brown's article on the CBA doesn't have one single issue dominating it, but instead gives sound analysis of the main issues of contention – contraction, revenue sharing, luxury tax, MLBAM profits, a salary cap, worldwide amateur draft, drug testing – before finally addressing The Question: will there be a work stoppage. Both Brown and his article are more optimistic than I would've imagined – though that may say more about my personal predilection for pessimism than anything else – as he tends to believe cooler heads will prevail in the next go around. The chapter also contains a nice page-long group of charts showing the payroll for all post-season bound teams over the last three years, and where these teams ranked in their division in terms of payroll. It also does a nice job quickly going over the potential profits of MLBAM. Altogether, these two articles on the business of baseball are both well worth reading.

Speaking of articles worth reading, there's also the piece titled: "GM in a Box: Walt Jocketty" by Cardinals superblogger Brian Gunn. I know I said that Brattain's article on 'riods was my personal favorite, but give me a few minutes to re-read Gunn's bit and I might flip my opinion. This is a fascinating look at the pros, cons, and general tendencies of one of the most successful GMs in the games. Generally when someone discusses a GM, they sum up his achievements in a few words "He's a frickin' idiot," or "He likes toolsy players" while Gunn gives an in-depth assessment on just what sort of GM Jocketty is. I'd love to see THT make the GM in a Box article a regular feature in their future books, and/or on their website. If it's feasible, I would love to see more than one of these in the '07 installment. The only problem I can foresee is that Gunn sets the bar so high with this piece that it will be mighty dang hard for any future installments to not be a letdown.

Though Gunn's article is the only one to really take an in-depth look at a GM, there is a similar article right after it – Matt Welch's "Getting with the Program." In this case "the Program" is the one run by Mike Scioscia out in the Los Angeles section of Anaheim. He notes that though Angels have never been a stat-head darling like division rival Oakland has, they have managed to get to the post-season in three of the last four years, and won it all once. He then commences an examination of the pros and cons of the Angels' Way. In doing so, he successfully manages to explain not only why they've been so successful – he lists seven main principles that guide Anaheim's philosophy in baseball – but also its limits. As is the case with Gunn's article on Jocketty, it's an extremely informative article on how a team operates.

Another thought-provoking article on the workings of a franchise's management team is Jon Weisman's "The DePo Era" about (obviously) the years the now departed Moneyball-man ran the Dodgers. There are two aspects of this article I particularly like. First, at the outset of the article Weisman confronts the fact that the controversy surrounding DePodesta is a polarizing one. Rather than feign neutrality, he admits right up front he's a DePo backer, and says you'll either think this article is garbage or brilliant. There was something about this introduction I found extremely disarming. Even though I'm quite a bit more skeptical on DePo's ability as a GM, I found myself willing to put that aside and hear Weisman out after this start. Second, he does a fine job placing the controversies of DePo's reign within the context of pre-existing embattlements that surrounded the franchise and owner Frank McCourt before DePo ever settled into the GM's chair in LA. This gives the reader a broader understanding of the entire story, and helps makes sense of just why things got so incredibly heated as they did for a GM who took the team to their first post-season appearance in two decades. The article isn't perfect as Weisman never addresses the fact that not only did they lose 91 games, but also they did it in an unbalanced schedule against the worst division ever. Also, he improbably claims on page 63, that "There is no evidence or anecdotal implication that [Milton Bradley's] personality undermined the performance of his teammates or cost the team victories." His definition of "anecdotal implication" is far different from any I'm familiar with. Feuding with the best hitter on a team badly underachieving qualifies. Overall though it is an insightful article that gives a nice blow- by-blow account of DePo's different roster moves.

This section contains one more in-depth examination of a team – Alex Belth's take on the New York Yankees. It's a very good piece, but not quite as memorable as the others. In part, it suffers because the story of the Yankees and their maneuvers is already so highly publicized and well-known, that it a brief 5 ½ page review of it will end up covering more ground that people are familiar with than the other articles (including the DePo one). It's an affective article – I especially liked the contrast he makes between Paul O'Neill and Alex Rodriquez – though I didn't come away learning as much as I did in the similar articles.

Those pieces were – for me at least – the highlights of this section, but the remaining four articles were all solid as well. The first article in the section is guest contributor Rob Neyer's piece "For Want of a Nail." It's an interesting examination of what moves teams that missed out on the postseason made that possibly/likely cost them a ticket to October. These he identifies as CIMMs – Clearly Identifiable Management Mistakes. He makes some good arguments on what hurt teams that juuuust missed out, and even concludes that one team had nothing to be ashamed of – they made no CIMMs.

David Cameron has an article on minor leaguers who made the Big Leap. Some of these guys will, of course, fade out and never make it, some will turn out to be flukes, but some will develop into the next something big. The focus here is entirely on minor leaguers. The more interested one is in that subject, the more he/she will get out of this article.

The last two articles both deal with international baseball, and were both written by Craig Burley (well, he co-wrote one). He was the sole writer of the article on Japanese Baseball. At two pages, it's the shortest article in the book, but it gives a nice synopsis of the recently completely Japanese baseball season. It gives the standings, a discussion of Japan's award winners, a lesson on the Colonel's Curse, and a brief summary of the year of Bobby Valentine. The other article – co-written by Thomas Ayers – is on the proposed World Baseball Classic. This piece goes over proposed and potential rosters for the different teams likely to play, and the framework for how the tournament's champion will be decided. They go into detail over the top contending teams, and briefly summarize the rest of the field. Though they didn't foresee the current controversies surrounding the Cuban team, I don't think they can be blamed for that. MLB didn't see that coming either. Aside from Mexico, who the authors admit they should've done more research on, they do a good job summarizing the available information.

Altogether, this section is bursting with brilliant observations, and wonderful research.

Section 3: History If Section 2 was the highlight, then this section was the one I found most disappointing. I enjoyed 29 of the 32 articles in this book, but 2 of the 3 I didn't think much of came from the 4 pieces in this section.

The first of the two disappointments is Steve Treder's piece on the 2005 season in historic perspective. I think this is the worst thing he's ever written for THT. This article – which comes in the midst of a book that discusses not only on-field issues, but also off- field concerns about the game – never once mentions the word "steroids." This is simply inexcusable. I can guess that Treder wanted to only deal with on-field issues, but he needs to say that rather than assume the reader knows it. A short 1-2 sentence paragraph explaining this curious omission would greatly improve the article. As is, it's like reading an article on the second Nixon administration that never touches on Watergate. It's the single biggest oversight in the book.

Aside from that, the article, sadly, isn't very good. His main point in the article is that the '05 season was one without any great historic portent, and no great individual achievements or memories. Ignoring Palmerio's Congressional testimony and looking solely at on-field issues, that's a fair point to make. He does a bad job making it though. In particular, he actually changes his argument on himself (apparently without entirely realizing it) when discussing the year's pennant races. After starting out by saying that they weren't historically great (so far so good), he mentions a book which discusses the worst years for pennant races in baseball history, quotes the book extensively, and then concludes than 2005 will take its rightful place alongside them. Its one thing to say the races weren't "GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT!!" great, but quite another to say they were historically awful.

This is especially bad given that many of the divisional reports in the beginning of the book rather clearly demonstrate that the races weren't awful. I don't mean to imply that all the articles in a volume with many different contributors should agree with each other. Disagreement between authors I can live with. The problem here is that Treder never presents evidence that the divisional races were historically woeful, and others provide evidence that they weren't. Also, it reads like an argument Treder slipped into while intending to say the races weren't historically great.

One other point rankled with me when I read it. Treder, in writing the NL West Division report, makes a point on how historically awful that division was in '05, but never addresses that here. It just seemed a little odd that he wouldn't even bring it up. I do think it's appropriate to ask that all articles written by one individual to avoid such an interpretive gap as this.

The other letdown is the piece on the Hall of Merit authored by Joe Dimino with help from John Murphy. They start off fine, by explaining just the format and rationale for the Hall of Merit (a project that is part of the baseballthinkfactory website). The idea is to elect an alternate Hall of Fame without the obvious mistakes like Tommy McCarthy and Rube Marquard. The article begins to falter when the authors make their transition into the main part of the article.

They mention that the Hall of Merit is (at the time they wrote this article) in its 1961 election cycle. Then they say that this article will cover the Hall of Merit elections up through their 1925 election. The reason for ignoring the last 36 elections is never explained. Frankly, it doesn't make much sense to me. The bizarreness of this decision is then compounded at the end of the article. There, they spend about a half-page giving several lists, two of which list men who aren't (as of 1925) in the Hall of Merit yet, but "still have a chance." Some of the people listed as "having a chance" at induction were in fact inducted well before this book went to print. Heck, many were put in several months before last year's THT Annual went to the publishers. There really needs to be some sort of explanation given for this decision on the part of the authors.

One has to ferret around in the article itself for an explanation. The best guess I can come up with is that it stems from how the heart of the article is organized. The centerpiece of this article is a blow-by-blow account of every single election from 1898- 1925. As a result of this approach, they would not have had room to discuss every election unless the book's editors gave them permission to have the longest article in the book. That would explain this article, but it wouldn't excuse it.

The problem is that the blow-by-blow account narrative style isn't just the best explanation for why the authors decided to pretend the last 36 elections haven't happened yet. The blow-by-blow structure is also the central problem with this article. This piece reads like a nineteenth century county history, and believe me that's not a compliment. Those histories are chock full of information, but no one ever touches them unless they absolutely need to find out some information about a given topic for their research or genealogical purpose or something like that. No one needs to read about the Hall of Merit though. And when they do discuss a more marginal player that many have never heard of, they don't have enough space to provide any really good information on him. This article's an inch deep and a mile wide – it contains a little bit of information on many bits, but nothing substantial on any of it. If they'd found a way to shorten up the information provided about people you don't need the HoM to find out about, they could've had more room on the rest.

I thought to myself when I finished this article - What's the purpose in writing this? Was it to increase awareness of the Hall of Merit? To attract new voters and contributors to it? To gain publicity for it? I couldn't think of any goal that they'd have which would be served by their article's structure. How about this for an alternate approach – first have a brief introduction, and then have a page with several columns of all current (through '61) inductees and their years inducted. You can fit multiple columns on one page and unless they use a huge font they can get the entire HoM roster on one page. Then spend the heart of the article on main themes of voting. They could have a bit on the best forgotten Negro Leaguers, or the players whose value is obscured because of time spent playing outside of MLB (which could range from Earl Averill to Lip Pike). Which players have they found to be the most underrated? The exact theme(s) to choose is a matter of debate, but if you just go choose one or two, you would have time and space to really dig deeper than an inch on some matter. That would be worth reading.

As is, they spend half their article on paragraphs that say things like – In year X, this Inner Circle Hall of Famer became eligible and we elected Y percent of the vote. – Any sentences on Mathewson or Wagner or Anson are wastes of ink, because everyone already knows that they're great. What is it that people can get out of the Hall of Merit?

One thing I can think of that I definitely wish had been included was how the process of participating in the Hall of Merit makes one aware of the different ways people have for judging value in a player. Prior to voting in it, I always thought that the election of Hughie Jennings to Cooperstown was a bad joke and that only an idiot would support that. Now, having read the debates, I can recognize and respect why someone might support his enshrinement though I personally still never would.

In part I found this a very frustrating read, because – as someone who has participated in the HoM and really appreciates it – I considered this a badly botched opportunity. I can't imagine that Dimino and Murphy will get an opportunity like this again to create awareness for their fine project. I can't imagine that this article will succeed in drawing many/any new voters or contributors to it. And that's just a dang shame.

There are also two good articles written by some guy named Bill James. Based on the pieces in this book, he ain't half-bad at this baseball writing stuff. His first article is on young pitchers. It's inspired by the Royals decision in recent years to go with a youth movement in their rotation, jettisoning unspectacular but potentially serviceable older pitchers like Darrell May. He wants to find out what correlation exists between how heavily a team relies on young pitching and how successful they are. He gets the result he expects (younger is generally – though not always – worse), and then spends almost half the article discussing things he accidentally found out by doing this study. This is maybe the most interesting part of the article, and if nothing else gives one a much greater level of respect for the 1950s Red Sox pitchers. He also begins the article by mentioning how he's no longer a Royals fan; which is surprising, until you think about it. Would Chris Dial still wear his ever-present Mets hat if another team started paying his mortgage? Nah. [Tattoos are a pain to remove, so you might be wrong. -DS]

James's other article is on that eternal sabermetric darling, Bert Blyleven. It's an attempt to wrestle with the central problem of Blyleven's statistical record: how could someone with his fantastic ERA+ end up with his lackluster W-L record. He compares Blyleven to several of his contemporary long lasting pitchers – Carlton, Sutton, Kaat, John, Niekro, & Jenkins – for perspective. His ultimate conclusion is that no matter how you slice it, Blyleven did not win as many games as he should have, and his teammates and his hitting cannot be given all the blame for his winning percentage. That being said, his critics have made too much of his losses, as he still was a historically tremendous pitcher. This is nothing hugely path breaking, but a finely researched and articulated article nonetheless. In fact, this article convinced at least one BBWAA member (Jayson Stark) to vote for the Dutchman for the first time in this year's election.

On a personal note, this article is quite noteworthy because it shows that he visited my now defunct runsupportindex.blogspot.com website. Had I known he was going to do this, I would have made a much more detailed discussion of what RSI said his W/L record should be. (It said he lost 11 wins due to poor run support, but still underachieved by 9 wins – findings roughly similar to what James argues here). Both James articles are fine reading.

Section 4: Analysis:

This section is the first really stat-heavy portion of the book. Previously, authors had discussed stats, but here's where stats become central to what's being discussed. The article contains nine articles. After a good – but not great – start – this section really takes off once the authors start centering their studies on information gained from Baseball Info Solutions (BIS). When they start delving into this stuff, you get the feeling you're reading about the Next Big Step Forward in baseball statistics. If you're a stathead, it's damn fine and exciting stuff. Altogether, this section is absolute must read sabermetric research. The nine articles that make up this section constitute one of the best parts of the book.

It begins with two solid, though not spectacular, articles. First, John Dewan, former head honcho for STATS Inc., presents a brief (barely over two pages) article called "What's So Magic[al] about 100 Pitches?" The answer, in his opinion, is nothing. He believes that the current interest in capping pitchers at that level hurts them. He does a study based on a pitch count estimator (apparently not tangotiger's) and the information from retrosheet to estimate pitch counts for every starting pitcher for every game since 1974. He determines, after a false start, that pitchers who are rode heavier in the first half of the year fair better in the second half than similar pitchers who are treated more gently. He then declares (referring to the false start which didn't give him the results he wanted), "Now that's more like it. The pattern I wanted to see is there." I know what he means, but there's a bad taste that comment left in my mouth. It sounds like if that study didn't work, he was going to keep on doing different breakdowns until he found one that he liked. That being said the study he does run makes sense, and the results sound solid.

Next up is Dan Fox's "Are You Feeling Lucky?" which attempts to quantify how un/lucky some teams were last year. To do this he looks at three components – 1) teams scoring more/less runs than they should've based on David Smyth's Base Runs formula, 2) teams allowing more/less than they should've based on the same formula, and 3) teams which over/underachieved their pythag projection (though he uses a more refined version called pythagenpat). He then gives the results, and it's an interesting study, but with a few problems.

First, he calls it "luck" while it's really under/overachieving according to his model. The difference? Other factors that he isn't controlling for can be influencing his results, and just calling it "luck" pretends as if no other factors come into play. For example, last year the Chicago Cubs were the second "unluckiest" team in scoring runs. Anyone who followed the Cubs closely last year knows that their offensive underachieving wasn't just luck. It was largely caused by Dusty Baker's insistence on putting a double shot of offensive hemlock at the top of the order – Neifi Perez and Corey Patterson – to lead off for offensive stud Derrek Lee. When the team's best offensive threat (by far) keeps coming up with no one on, and two outs, that's going to decrease the scoring. Admittedly it wasn't just managing as the Cubs also did a substandard job hitting in the clutch, but Fox's assertion that it's just luck is unfounded. Other than an off-hand parenthetical comment about Leo Mazzone near the end of the article, Fox never acknowledges the role that coaching could play, or any other factor other than luck could distort this information.

There's another, more curious problem. On p. 140 he has a chart of how lucky/unlucky each team in baseball was last year in terms of runs, and how there win/loss records are adjusted according. Turns out that if it wasn't for "luck" major league baseball teams should've gone 56 games over .500 (2458-2402). . . Hmmm . . . Something seems a little off there. May want to adjust this. Teams averaged –8.7 runs worth of luck. So the Twins, at –8 runs, were actually a little luckier than average, but lose a win in the adjustment. By my quickie calculations, the main issue rests with estimated runs allowed – all baseball was 170 runs unlucky last year. I don't mean to beat on Fox too much. It is a very good article, as the factors he deals with do involve IMHO a definite degree of luck, and this does give the reader a decent idea of which teams over/underachieved the most, but it does need some tweaking.

And then, after the initial two articles in this section, things get much more exciting. In the next article, "What's a Batted Ball Worth," by Studes, the reader first gets his serious dose of BIS information. BIS is a company that collects, among other things, "batted ball types" for each plate appearance in baseball. From this information one can find out how many infield flies (re: pop ups) each batter hit, or how many line drives each pitcher allows. It allows a whole new breakdown of how batters and pitchers fare. In this article, Studes gives a chart which tells how often what each kind of batted ball resulted in what sort of plate appearance. For example, 18.3% of all line drives went for doubles, 74.4% of outfield flies went for fair ball outs, 2.5% of grounders resulted in errors, etc. From this they can give an approximate run value for each type of batted ball result. This article is short (at 2 pages it's tied for shortest in the book), and mostly serves to set up several of the following articles, but it's fascinating in and off itself.

The next article, also by Studes, takes the BIS information and applies it to parks. I safely assume that the overwhelming majority of people reading this book review at btf are familiar with park factors which look at a park's impact on run scoring, but this takes this several levels further. Rather than looking at how parks affect the offensive results, this looks at why different parks have these different results. Which parks seem to have more line drives? Fewer ground balls? This is breaking park factors down into component parts. The first half of the article is Studes giving an explanation of how the BIS tells us, and the second half gives us a park-by-park chart on the BIS park factor info. All park factors are four-year averages unless noted otherwise.

Next Studes writes his third consecutive article based on BIS information. Like the first two, it's great. Instead of looking at ballparks, now we shift focus to defense. It's another brief article – a nearly page long chart accompanied by less than two pages of text, but what it lacks in quantity it more than makes up for in quality. In discussing the increasing popularity of DER (Defensive Efficiency Rating) he notes that though this stat has its considerable advantages, it also has holes in it. The park can affect DER. The amount of line drives the pitchers give up affects it, etc. This is where the BIS information comes in. Using the BIS breakdowns of batted ball results discussed in his first article in this section, and the park effects information in the second one, he's constructed a chart that rates the defenses for all teams. It rates the Indians as possessors of the best D in the game, and the Royals as having the worst.

After three straight brilliant articles by Studes, J. C. Bradbury and David Gassko team up for the unenviable task of following them up. Using the same BIS info Studes had just studied, they exam how much impact pitchers and batters have on each type of batted ball. In short, they use the BIS info to re-examine DIPS. They do double regression studies, correlations, have charts, and the works for each one. Depending on your own mathematical knowledge and ability, this article can be tricky, because it's frankly the roughest sledding in the book to read. It might be a little more readable if their conclusion summarized their data instead of just saying that this info is all preliminary.

One compliment I can pay their writing is that these two, unlike the authors of every other team-written article in the book, realize that when there's more than one author, it makes no sense to use "I" in the article. The others did this and it's just confusing. Unless they're trying to let us know that Joe Dimino and John Murphy fused into one being, or that Gleeman ate Studes, it's no good. J. C. & Gassko are the only ones who have learned the valuable rule of team writing: WWRD – What Would Rickey Do. No first person here. Good.

Next, Bradbury goes solo in what I believe is the best article in this section of the book. Previously we'd seen people use BIS information to discuss different ball types, and what that tells about parks, fielders, and DIPS. Now we really start getting at the heart of things as Bradbury looks at what this info tells us about hitters. The method is fairly simple – take how often a batter did certain things – hit non-homer line drives, look at his G:F ratio, his strikeout ratio, and other similar numbers – and determine what his OPS should have been based on the value each of these sort of plate appearances have. This is heady stuff. He calls it PrOPS (Projected OPS). He then shows that players who clearly overachieve their PrOPS one year tend to fall backwards, and those who underachieve rise up. Very engrossing information. He concludes with two charts – top 25 overachievers and underachievers last year according to PrOPS. Great stuff. The only question I have looking at these charts is the role of batter foot speed and how to account for that. Looking at the underachievers, many of its people are slow older guys – Giambi, Konerko, Matheny, Ausmus. The list contains a disproportionate number of catchers as well. It would make sense that these guys wouldn't achieve their PrOPS because they're easier to throw out. The overachiever list meanwhile has players like Scott Podsednik and Willy Taveras on it. Again, shouldn't faster players be more likely to overachieve by this metric? Still, it's wonderful stuff here. Articles like this that make me think that this is the Next Statistical Revolution.

Next up is Dan Fox again with an article on base running, and it may very well be the second-best article in this section. By getting his hands on play-by-play data for all 2005 (he doesn't say BIS, but I assume that's where this came from) he constructed a formula for measuring base running called IR, Incremental Runs. Short version: he has figured the Run Expectancy for every base running scenario in the game (example: no runners on and two outs is worth 0.107 runs on average) and then uses this to determine how much a runner added (or subtracted) to his team's ability to win based on his base running. What's great about this is he's not just looking at stolen bases and caught stealing, but even things like going from first to third on a single. Best base runner in the game? Carlos Beltran. The difference between him and second place (Robinson Cano) is almost equal to the difference between second and thirteenth. Nice. Worst? Luis Gonzalez. Tampa was the best team on the bases and Philly the worst. He even gives some base running park factors. It's easily the best article on base running I've ever read.

This section ends with the least memorable article of the bunch – Studes (in the fourth article this section alone he's authored, and sixth in the book he either authored or co- authored) discusses a cute toy – net win shares value. It attempts to estimate how much financial value a player is worth based on win shares. He gives the best values, worst values, best free agent deals, and ranks every free agent class from 1998-2004 by this metric. It's interesting but after the path breaking and revolutionary stuff preceding it, this article's just OK.

Section 5: Statistics

Now that the analysis is done, time for the raw stats. It takes up over 150 pages of this 334-page book.

It starts off with a "Welcome to Our Stats" article that primarily serves as a glossary. It's a glossary, containing everything from OPS+/ERA+ on upward. The only comment I can make is that they should make it clearer in the table of contents that this is the glossary. Just listing it as "Welcome to Our Stats," a title that could easily lead one to think it's an introductory essay instead of a brief definition of all the sabermetric stats contained in this book. Also, it's buried in the table of contents and easy to miss there. For me it's not a big concern because I've been reading this stuff for 20 years, but for a sabermetric neophyte it would really come in handy if a quick glance of the table of contents let him/her know where the glossary is. Maybe put it in bold or something.

After the glossary comes the deluge. First you get 9 pages of stats and graphs per league. Five pages of it are leaderboards (almost entirely of traditional stats) of individual leaders, while the other four pages give the reader all sorts of various team stats. First there's the AL, and then the NL.

After going league-by-league, THT shifts to team-by-team. Four pages on each team – over one-third the book in all – of a graph, then stats, stats, and more stats. The graph is a well-designed item that's fairly easy to read while giving you three separate pieces of information: a teams' average runs scored, runs allowed, and wins for every possible ten game block all year long. You can very easily trace the course of each team's seasons, and note just how horrifically bad the D-backs pitching was in August, or how consistently good the A's hitting and pitching was during their hot spell. The charts even contain a dotted line to tell you what league average runs/game was. Below the graph is the only other bit of info on the page, a month-by-month summary of some of the most important stats. Page two contains batting stats – both traditional, and some sabermetric. The third page for each team goes over pitchers. Also, the charts containing player stats are incredibly easy to read as every other row is in slightly darker background to make it easy to follow across the page. Very well done. The final page for each team gives fielding and base running stats. The teams are in alphabetical order by city name. Teams in both leagues are handled at the same time.

Then, there's another a section on stats – BIP-based fielding range stats. This consists of about a half-page summary on what the methodology of this fielding stat is followed by 3+ pages of numbers on all the principle players for all teams. The methodology behind the stat seems sound, I have no problem with it . . . . and then I glance at the results and read that Paul Konerko was a more valuable defensive player than Aaron Rowand last year. Huh? I don't care how sound the stat seems – I don't buy that for one minute.

Finally, the book gives its last hunk of stat – plate appearance outcomes. It gives you the BIS percentages for every hitter with at least 400 PA last year. The chart gives you player's name, team, PA, K%, BB%, GB%, OF-Fly%, IF-Fly%, Line Drive%, and Other. Then it gives you the same information for pitchers. The only difference is that here they list BFP instead of PA, and lower the cutout point to 300 BFP. So if you want to do your own studies with this stuff, you can. By jamming up to 100 player on a page, this section only lasts 6 pages.

Finally, comes the about the authors section (titled Who's Who officially). One of the contributors even offers special thanks "to the deviants at Baseball Think Factory." One minor oddity about this section is that, according to the book's table of contents, it's officially part of the statistics section. Heh.

Altogether, it's a fantastic book. When I got it, I tore through it in about 48 hours. I've already gone back to look at it frequently. I'm sure I'll be consulting it for as long as I own it. Though there are small amount of articles I found disappointing, I enjoyed over 90% of them. For every one that swings and misses there are multiple that hit homers worthy of Pujols in Game 5 of the NLCS. I can't imagine there being a better or more thoughtful review of the recently completed season. It's been years since I've read a baseball books with so many intriguing analytical articles on the game. Simply put, anyone who doesn't go to amazon.com or the nearest Borders bookstore and buy and read the new Hardball Times Baseball Annual is missing out on one of the best baseball books that will come out all year.