Winners

A crucial fact to recognize about the book is its target audience. Perry is not writing aiming at the previously converted stathead, but rather at the general baseball fan. He uses sabermetric stats – VORP, SNLVAP, DER, DIPS and so forth – but he has no intention of having in-depth discussions of the math behind them. At the outset of the book he even jokingly refers to them as acronyms which sound like German profanity. This does force him to walk a tightrope, though. If he gives too much mathematical background on these Reich curses, then his audience will find themselves wishing they were reading the manual for their VCR. However, if he gives too little, then they will not have any idea what he is talking about. Ultimately, he performs this high-wire act admirably. At some points a little more background for the reader would help, but on the whole the book does not fall apart.

The chapters focus on pitching (three actually, one for starters, closers, and middlemen, respectively), hitting, fielding, base stealing, the front office, team age, and luck. That is pretty good coverage, but he did not include anything on managers. Though it is not a crippling oversight, it would be interesting to see how the managerial tendencies of October-bound teams compared with other teams.

In each chapter, Perry spends most of his time regaling the reader with tales of the teams and their players. Perry is in his element with these colorful anecdotes because he is a wonderful writer with a nice way with words. He peppers the pages with wry observations and amusing descriptions. He characterizes Will Clark’s 1987 stolen base percentage “an international incident on the base paths,” brushes off Deion Sanders as “a novelty outfielder,” rightfully claims that Dennis Eckersley looked more like a bassist for Foghat than a baseball player, describes the defensive ability of the 2000 A’s as “tastes like . . . triples!” and my personal favorite – says Johnny Damon’s unwashed look appeared to be “the residue of some unholy coupling of a porn star and a neo-Luddite hostage taker.”

Even aside from the humor, the man can tell a story. Each chapter tells a host of stories about players and post-season teams, and all keep the reader’s attention. One can relive the glory of a young Dwight Gooden as well as his sad aftermath. Or remember the achievements of minor-leaguer-skipping Bob Horner. Finally, he feels no need to “dumb down” his writing. He has a large vocabulary, and he knows how to use it. If that means people have to dive to their dictionaries to look up penumbras, porcine, endomorphs, opacity, patois, and oeuvre, or wonder what Plato’s world of forms were, or what it means to be a “hydra-headed center fielder”, then so be it. While this could cost him readers as some might feel too much goes over their heads, Perry should not be criticized for wielding a wide array of words. Instead, he should be applauded for his willingness to assume that his readers possess more than an eighth grade education.

As for the analysis itself, much – though not all of it – will be rather familiar to the typical Primate. Stolen bases are overrated, but speed is valuable because it can help the team in other ways. You can learn a lot about a pitcher based on his defense independent stats. Errors and fielding percentage are overrated, but range and getting to the ball are underrated.

Though the research is not path breaking, at times it is both interesting and thought provoking. One of his most interesting bits of research concerned the trade line. He contends, and convincingly shows that though most playoff teams do make trades, their impact is often minimal, and the best trades are often the ones done well-before the deadline. He also makes a fantastic case for Walt Jocketty as the premier in-season dealmaker. In discussing closers, he demonstrates that while modern day ninth inning specialists’ value is lessened by their paucity of innings compared to the firemen of yore, their leverage is actually higher. He makes an interesting point on age, showing that play-off teams are a bit older than other teams on average. Speaking as someone who thinks that the sabermetric community tends to be too dismissive of anyone over the age of 30, I liked that point. Even in some of the topics that are very familiar to Primates, he makes convincing arguments. For example, while arguing that stolen bases are overrated, he does a nice job using Rickey Henderson’s career to show how little of his worth as a player came from those mountains of stolen bases.

Perhaps his most interesting bit of analysis comes in the section on sluggers. Here he stands sabermetric orthodoxy on its head by arguing that SLG’s importance exceeds that of OBP. For evidence, he divides up baseball history into a series of 25 year periods (though the first and last periods are both a little longer than a quarter century) and shows that in the current age, almost all proceeding periods, and the entirely of MLB history a better correlation exists between winning and SLG than with OBP. Very interesting stuff, but he does not make his case as strongly as he could. At other points in the book, he briefly delves into a statistical analysis controversy or changes in opinion within the sabermetric community on given topics (such as the importance of defense for the overall success of a ballclub). These discussion really need more elaboration to summarize the shifting sabermetric positions, because Perry argues completely against the wind. Alas, his only depiction of the pro-OBP position is a reference to Michael Lewis’s Moneyball. Yup, that’s the only passage. Ah well. On the whole, his analysis is good, though (for better and for worse) no one will ever confuse Dayn Perry with Tangotiger or mgl.

Though Perry masterfully handles the stories and provides good analysis, the whole is less than the sum of its parts in Winners. The stories, though always entertaining, generally do very little to bolster his points. Exhibit A: his discussion of the 1987 Tigers in his chapter on defense. Perry’s analysis centers on how errors are overrated because the crucial part of defense is getting to the ball, rather than avoiding kicking it around. To this end, he reasonably champions park adjusted Defensive Efficiency as a superior metric for defensive performance. In the chapter he provides a list of the worst defensive play-off teams since 1980 according to park adjusted DER. The 1987 Tigers are one of these teams. He then spends the last fourth of the chapter discussing how many players on that Tiger team are historically underrated. I have no disagreement with his assessment of Trammell as a deserving Hall of Famer, or that it is a joke that Lou Whitaker fell off the ballot on his first try, or that Chet Lemon and Darrell Evans are underrated. Also, he does a good job telling their stories – heck, his depiction of Evans and the UFO is one of the highlights of the book. BUT – if his main point in the chapter is to point out the importance of getting to the ball, why does he spend a half-dozen pages singing the praises for the players on a team who, by his very own defensive metric of choice, did an exceedingly bad job of getting to the ball? The ’87 Detroit stories not only don’t back up his point, if anything they undermine his key argument in the chapter.

Admittedly, the tale of the ’87 Tigers is an extreme example as normally his stories do not cut against his main points, but far too often his stories seem irrelevant to his points. His stories entertain, but he does not do very much to link them to the points he is attempting to make except in the most basic way of “this chapter is about hitters, now here’s a three page synopsis of the career and life of a guy who could hit.” Immediately after reading some chapters, one has to flip back through it to find Perry's original point as it got lost in the thick descriptions of Ted Turner’s rise to billionare-dom, or Pedro Guerrero’s pathetic post-career life. Hell, his chapter on middle relievers may not have had a point beyond arguing that middle relievers who get guys out are better than ones who do not. There is nothing wrong with a having a book which does little more than tell tales. Everyone reading this review can think of at least one personal favorite baseball book composed of just good stories but no real point. BUT, if an author structures a book and presents its material in a way that leads the reader to believe there is a central point, the stories dang well better be more than enjoyable larks filling up space.

Aiming for a wider audience is no excuse for not relating his tales to his main point. There is a difference between loosely making an argument, and barely making a point. Stories can be interesting and serve a larger goal. A writer should take the occasional tangent. Much of the best writing from Bill James or Tom Boswell and countless other writers come when they momentarily veer off, but off-topics discursions only work when there is a main point consistently being made. In Winners, nearly eighty percent of each chapter is stories, while the remaining twenty percent is the supplementary analysis, with the two only tying together in the broadest possible way. Mostly, each chapters read like two separate articles written on the same general topic, but with no unifying theme. It makes for a frustrating read. The stories are not always unrelated, but rarely clearly pertain to whatever point Perry is trying to make. Too often, one can finish the book and not quite be clear what his main ideas where. One would easily be able to talk about Kevin Mitchell, and Bert Blyleven, and Rickey Henderson, and Dave Dravecky, and a host of others though.

Winners is a tale told by a wordsmith, full of verve and wit, but signifying little. Ultimately, it is worth a read from the library or while perusing in a Barnes & Noble, but the reader may wonder if he should have really forked over the cover price.

In what appears be a very busy year for baseball books, this one probably should not be your top priority unless you really like reading stories about championship teams. I don’t want to sound too harsh, as I did genuinely enjoy reading it. Winners" is good, but not great.