{"id":2401,"date":"2017-05-26T15:04:26","date_gmt":"2017-05-26T23:04:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=2401"},"modified":"2017-05-26T15:04:26","modified_gmt":"2017-05-26T23:04:26","slug":"review-smart-baseball","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=2401","title":{"rendered":"Review: Smart Baseball"},"content":{"rendered":"

Smart Baseball<\/em> is Keith Law’s introduction to the basics of sabermetric baseball statistics and why fans should care about them. I’ve been hearing about this revolution in baseball statistics for a while, albeit peripherally. Law does a fine job explaining the shortcomings in older statistics, explaining many of the new ones, and pointing out the effects this is having on statistics gathering and other ramifications for baseball going forward.<\/p>\n

Honestly, I learned as much about the prevailing attitudes in baseball as I did about new statistics.\u00a0 My conclusion is that if the baseball broadcasting, management, and fan constituency is resisting these ideas this to any extent – and I believe they are – hide-bound does not come close to expressing the status quo. I have enough of a traditionalist in me that I feel no pain in continuing to report saves and RBIs (and yes I prefer appending the ‘s’ for the plural), but as tools for understanding the game they are both baroque and broke.<\/p>\n

Law does a fabulous job of laying out the case for adding on-base percentage<\/a> (OBP), slugging percentage<\/a> (SLG) and their stable mates to common usage.\u00a0 Law’s approach is reasonable and clear.\u00a0 He never argues that the new statistics are somehow perfect or should be used as matters of religion.\u00a0 All statistics and observational frameworks illuminate and emphasize different aspects of the game.\u00a0 Nothing emphasized that more for me than the slash line (AVG\/OBP\/SLG).\u00a0 Characterizing a batter by the triple of traditional batting average, an on-base metric, and slugging lets me understand a batter better.\u00a0 I can get the gut feel that a historical batting average gives me, the more sound OBP indication of out avoidance, and the marginal value of each hit (how often the guy goes extra bases).\u00a0 That historical value will keep going down, so eventually the slash line will probably get smaller.<\/p>\n

How does one even marshal an argument against that?\u00a0 Ink costs?<\/p>\n

As the he explains more data-driven metrics like those used to evaluate fielding and then the overarching wins above replacement<\/a> (WAR) formalisms, he makes the source of the numbers clear.\u00a0 I should be clear that he explains the process of getting and evaluating the data, not the formulas.\u00a0 Some of the formulas are – surprisingly to me – proprietary anyway.\u00a0 As a result I understand the formulation and limitation of these combination metrics better. And they do have limitations.\u00a0 While I find the simple batting metrics to be fairly objective, WAR and the fielding evaluations include a healthy dose of subjective evaluation.\u00a0 Which ones light up which aspects of the game is trickier to see.\u00a0 If one wants to make those evaluations, Law shows you what to investigate.<\/p>\n

Finally he describes how these stats (and the old ones) are used today in scouting and other player evaluations.\u00a0 He also describes Baseball’s new commitment to providing a torrent of detailed data.\u00a0 One assumes that this is to even out data collection’s marginal value to teams as well as amortizing collection costs.\u00a0 The result is an incredible mine of information, though.<\/p>\n

Overall a cool book from which I learned a lot.<\/p>\n

Recommended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Smart Baseball is Keith Law’s introduction to the basics of sabermetric baseball statistics and why fans should care about them. I’ve been hearing about this revolution in baseball statistics for a while, albeit peripherally. Law does a fine job explaining the shortcomings in older statistics, explaining many of the new ones, and pointing out the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2401","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2401"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2401\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2403,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2401\/revisions\/2403"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}