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Baseball Primer Newsblog — The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand Thursday, March 10, 2011New book takes apart the Bill James-Moneyball mythsHow did newbie-blogger Murray Chass get a book deal so fast?
Repoz
Posted: March 10, 2011 at 10:41 AM | 64 comment(s)
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1. JRVJ Posted: March 10, 2011 at 10:52 AM (#3767821)2. It is a sad sign for American public discourse that this book seems to be attacking a strawman of what Moneyball was about (i.e., that there can be success in valuing what others do not value).
3. It's curious but I'd say good that this book is coming out at the same time as J. Keri's book, which is a different slant on the ultimate Moneyball premise (that there are many ways to skin a cat, but that pricing what others do not price or doing things different than other teams can be very valuable).
And for all these years I thought it ended the Yankees chance to win that World Series. See, you never stop learning!
Let's try something...
But that would be ideological.
Whew, finally Rickey might get some credit.
The authors seem to think people who follow the statistical bent of baseball don't enjoy the game, seem to think that they can predict with 100% certainty what will happen, and of course the argument that attention to stats sucks the life out of sport...I thought being a fan of non-winning team sucks the life out of a sport.
How does Maris not receiving any intentional walks invalidate the moneyball approach?
and of course as mentioned the fact that these writers just don't seem intelligent enough to even understand what Moneyball was about makes this book less appealing.
I guess getting the blurb and of course the eventual link on Primer will help generate buzz for the book.
Of course they are, but how many times have we read here that we should dismiss the opinions of contemporary players, scouts and writers? I often have to wonder whether those people have ever read Bill James.
If you're talking about the one I think you're talking about, you may want to reconsider. In theory, it should've been interesting and insightful, but in practice, not so much.
prediction: there will be no shockwaves
Laughter is a form of shockwave.
to some extent you have to dismiss the scouts and others, memory is a tricky beast and bias creeps up in everything. I always point out how beloved a player is who starts out hot and then can't perform, but the fans fall in love with the player and see no wrong even after weeks of futility, the reverse is also true. Factor in the extreme subjective nature of scouting and that there was really no check and balances to ensure that a scout was actually good or any type of training other than years in the majors/minors and you have a profession that is filled with a wide range of quality personel, some are obviously going to be great at their jobs and treat it like a professional, others will skirt on by since there is almost no supervision when they get out in the field. I imagine that 'advance' scouts are probably better on the whole at their job than talent scouts as that has some level of supervision.
On this site we appreciated people like ChadBradford Wannabee who could explain the mechanical aspects who seemed to take the job seriously etc so it's not like the scouting concept is completely dismissed(although there was at least one person who bagged on CBW) Heck I doubt that there is any person on this site who wouldn't love to have all the scouting reports in digital format, it's a treasure trove of information that could really help validate scouts or be useful in potentially fixing flaws in the system.
NOTE: I think over the past 10-15 years or so, that a lot of the flaws have been fixed, everything I've read on here(articles and other stuff) has seemed to show that the system has gotten a lot more professional. (Cellphones and the internet kinda forced that to happen)
Scouts Honor (I think) I haven't picked it up yet but I think that one of my future goals is to get at least one book on everyteam, that somewhat tells a story. I also like the fact that it was written somewhat in response to Moneyball, but I have a funny feeling it's another person that doesn't get what Moneyball was. (which is funny, it's in the title, it's not stat ball, it's Money ball)
Scout's Honor spent a lot of time giving the Braves credit for drafting Francoeur who was a first round pick that said he would go to college if a team other than the Braves picked him. I'm all for giving the Braves' scouting guys credit but the book never found that guy that no one else liked that their scouts nailed.
And of course imagine a writer who is in the locker room of the White Sox for a full year, and in the front office (it would have been even better if he was there when Oney was there)
You are right though, Moneyball does a good job of telling the story, you flip through the book pretty quickly and I think any book that tries to emulate that, needs to understand why the book worked.
Bill Shanks.
Good question. I guess I could RTFB, and I still might. But when one runs across a "teaser" item like this, it's usually fun to think about it. If it's not fun to think about, the item is nonsense.
Who draws intentional walks? It's always a relative matter. You draw an IBB when you are better than the hitter on deck. Maris spent most of 1961 batting ahead of Mickey Mantle, enough said. The team's leaders in IBBs were Mantle himself, Skowron, and Blanchard, who tended to bat in front of weaker hitters: Mantle because he was Mantle, and the other two because they batted lower in the order.
OK, so what. This invalidates Moneyball because ... Moneyball likes guys who walk. Moneyball values guys like Barry Bonds who draw a lot of IBBs. Barry Bonds actually isn't that good a player because it's all just luck anyway, you might have a great year and draw no IBBs at all. I'm running out of ideas here. Help!
note: looking at the splits it claims three double plays, not sure which is right. Either way I don't see how anyone stat based or traditional base would argue that you intentionally walk Maris to face a superior hitter in Mantle, who never grounds into double plays and was a faster player even if you get the force in front of him, and was a switch hitter so you aren't even going for a platoon advantage.
Yeah, not walking somebody in front of the 6th best hitter (by rate stats - OPS+, wRC+) of all time seems like pretty solid conventional wisdom (stat and trad).
They could call it Oneyball.
This book has a xenophobic undercurrent?
Probably, because Strawmen always sway in the breeze of intolerant rhetoric.
Wow. I'm actually curious as to what kind of weird stretch the authors make to connect these ideas. Here's a political equivalent:
Did you know that in 1824, John Quincy Adams was elected president despite receiving only 30 percent of the popular vote? The authors explain why this curious datum helps expose the shortcomings of sustained deficit spending.
So they're saying the results of a small sample of games, such as a single contest or a short series of them, is difficult to predict, the outcome something of a crapshoot.
I've got a bunch of his books but never seen how he arrives at it. I've seen the high level view somewhere (age of team, strength of AAA team, second half record, etc), but haven't ever seen how he puts a number to it saying a team's leading indicators are up 18.1 or down 5.8 or whatever.
This one time, I saw a pitcher hit a game winning home run. I know "statistics" say that pitchers are bad hitters, but that doesn't value "the short hop". I will not rest until the Jays bat their pitcher cleanup, to take advantage of this insight.
Also one time a pigeon got hit by a base ball. Take that centuries of mathematical analysis and reasearch on random events and making them tractable with statistical models!
Jeff Francoeur should not have written this book!
You mean the Twins that haven't won a playoff series since 2002?
See what I mean? Jeff Francoeur don't know sh1t!
Typical traditionalists, ascribing what they can't predict to ####### luck.
Wait, they've soared? I mean, yeah, winning divisions is one definition of "soaring", but they always lose to the Yankees. I mean, they'd probably soar if they didn't always draw the Yankees every year they would go soaring.
Oh wait, that happened and they lost to....
The Athletics!
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
1. 95 WS
2. Entire 91 season, except for the last game
3. Learning that John Sterling would no longer be a Braves announcer
Who is saying that baseball can be condensed to numerical terms that make it predictable?
Dollar Sign on the Muscle?
ah geez, the very next post.
according to these brilliant researchers, the writer of Moneyball, Bill James.
He's certainly published the 7 factors (initially 6 but added one more), but the relative weights of each factor, nope.
Team Age (Young teams tend to improve)
Change relative to previous year. (Teams that improve a lot in one year tend to regress and vice versa)
Record compared to their pythag (Teams that out-perform their pythag tend to regress)
Runs scored compared to runs created (Teams that score more runs than you'd expect given their counter stats tend to regress)
Record from August 1 (Teams that play much better late in the season are often casting off dross)
W/L record (good teams tend to decline, bad teams tend to improve)
Record of AAA team (the new factor)
All these year later and I still haven't gotten around to running my own study on these factors.
http://www.amazon.com/Scorecasting-Hidden-Influences-Behind-Sports/dp/0307591794/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1299781443&sr=8-1
So, the A's will win 95 games. Why even play the season, let's skip straight to the playoffs!
Well, there are the people who publish predictions based on analysis of numbers. Like, the existence of ZIPS suggests that Dan Szymborski thinks that baseball is, to some degree, predictable, right?
"Projections are not predictions" is the baseball version of "correlation does not imply causation."
Haven't read it (yet), but I liked the book he did with Steve Fireovid.
That finding from Scorecasting has attracted criticism. Haven't read it yet, am agnostic on the issue.
Shanks (Scouts Honor) doesn't impress me as a thinker.
As for this, who knows? The blurb at the top of the page is kind of stupid.
Those T-shirts are done by a good friend of my girlfriend (his name is Jeremy)--so feel free to buy, as its a good cause.
The only way to find out, of course, is to RTFB.
We now return you to the regularly scheduled blood-letting...
"No fair! You changed the outcome by measuring it!" -Professor Farnsworth -
It's interesting that the most popular book that "Customers Who Bought Prophet of the Sandlots: Journeys With A Major League Scout" also bought was "Moneyball".
I'll second the recommendation; I really liked this one.
(I still try to get relatively-inexperienced ballplayers to throw off a wall - really is the best thing for Ye Olde Catch & Throw)
So, since the Twins only recent playoff series win was over the A's, and the A's likewise have only beaten the Twins, can we throw out the results when those two teams have played each other? They should both be considered winless in the playoffs until they beat someone else.
This could have also happened in the 2003 World Series, if the Cubs and Red Sox had both advanced.
And to a lesser extent, it did occur in the 1995 World Series, when the Braves beat the Indians.
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