Buy The Book
The book is now at Amazon at half off for those waiting for a good deal.
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They’re top 10 on the Amazon bookseller list, so if you are wondering how can they make money selling something at 50% off, the answer is volume.
There have been several reviews of the new book Scorecasting by an economist, Tobias Moskowitz, and an SI writer, L. Jon Wertheim. Among them are those by Chris Jaffe and Phil Birnbaum, both very smart sabermetricians and critical analysts. I encourage everyone to read both the book and the reviews. Here are the links to the reviews:
http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/book-review-scorecasting/
http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=13003
Phil also talks about the book on his (excellent) blog:
http://sabermetricresearch.blogspot.com/
Anyway, I agree with the general comments in both reviews. The book is well worth reading although they make some claims which appear to be dubious, as is often the case with mainstream books or works by authors who are not subject matter experts about which they are writing.
I decided to duplicate some of their research - at least that which seemed dubious to me - to see if it will hold up to scrutiny by a subject matter expert (me).
Here is what I came up with on the first pass:
Phil’s review at BPro.
Phil is like the Roger Ebert of sports material reviews. He really immerses himself in whatever he’s reviewing, bringing some examples for the reader to follow along with. You really get a sense after reading his book or academic reviews that the reader is given enough information to make up his own mind.
By our own MAH.
Pre-order now. If Michael is smart about it, he’ll get an excerpt over at Hardball Times pronto…
A book called: “Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, Part II” features Marcel heavily.
I have to tell you, I get the same feeling opening this book as I did opening James’ Abstracts. This is what sabermetrics is all about. I just love it.
Anyway, I’m working with Retrosheet data right now, so I can’t read the whole book right now as I should, so I’m just going to flip through it during breaks. Right now, the piece de resistance is p 109-110 from Ben J, that shows the out rates for outfielders based on hang time and direction from center point. This is EXACTLY what the future is. And it’s EXACTLY how scouts think. Think of Shane Jensen’s continuous model, but that uses hang time instead of discrete trajectories (FB, LD) and batted ball speed (hard, medium, soft).
This is what we are working toward. Anyway, I’ll check back in during my breaks.
I’ve read about thirty Dan Gutman books (which means that he is now my #1 author, ahead of Bill Watterson’s twenty or so and Bill James’s 10 or so), but none of them was listed here. His bibliography.
Thank you to that author for suggesting The Book in their stocking stuffer.
When friends ask me what I do, I inevitably fall back to saying “I mine sports data”. It’s the easiest, simplest explanation.
A professor from Arizona sent me an examination copy of his new book, called: Sports Data Mining (Integrated Series in Information Systems). It’s a textbook, so you’ll get sticker shock price.
Having flipped through it, I would say that the intended audience would be those who want the overall view of the available sources for a bunch of different sports (several new ones I haven’t heard of, which is saying alot since I try to keep up with it all), as well as some of the various questions that sports mining is intended to answer. It’s not a lab book that gives you any kind of step-by-step instructions to process the data.
I think this is the kind of book that you’d want to leaf through at the bookstore in two minutes, and if you like it, you’ll take it. It’ll give you that kind of instant decision making ("yes, exactly what I want”, “uh, no, not at all what I need"). There’s no in-between really.
UPDATE: Google Books.
Looks like fun.
I think I mentioned already that my piece is called something like “Three Things I Always Wanted To Research”. There’s one about BABIP which you may find a bit interesting, one on leverage and Rivera, and a third on aging arcs of young and old hitters.
Baseball Digest was probably the formative magazine of my youth. Bob Hertzel touches on all the aspects that made it so.
For those looking for the entire library, bow down to Google Books. Based on my memory of the covers of the books, I started collecting around here.
Colin is doing what’s right:
I took a look at how often the team with the best sauce won each series, from ’06 (the first season the Sauce was used) through ’09, and the result was only 54% success – not significantly better, statistically speaking, than flipping a coin.... It’s possible that the Secret Sauce ran up against a few years where its performance was flukily low. But what we have is a model based on historical data that has thus far been ineffective at predicting results out-of-sample, which doesn’t give us a lot of reason to be confident in it going forward. So for now, we’re retiring the Secret Sauce.
I think Colin should have been more forceful and acknowledged that regardless of what the Secret Sauce said, it should have been retired. As MGL noted, how does completely ignoring a team’s offense supposed to be a good thing? The best you could have hoped for with indicators like this, is that the win% would go from .500 (all other things equal) to .510, maybe .520. With such little out-of-sample data to work with, you could never achieve anything close to a reasonable uncertainty level.
Anyway, I love that an outsider like Colin is fixing right what is wrong.
Buy the book on principle, and if that’s not good enough, then Studes gives you good reasons:
- Ben Jedlovec of Baseball Info Solutions and the folks at Sportvision are both going to talk about their latest data collection efforts. Ben will discuss the “hang time” of batted balls and the Sportvision folks will discuss the FIELDf/x system they implemented in San Francisco this year. Both articles will include some preliminary results and findings.
- Along those lines, Dave Cameron will discuss the state of fielding analysis in the sabermetric community and Brian Cartwright will take a new and (I hope) improved look at some the dimensions behind fielding analysis.
- Craig Wright, one of the very first sabermetricians to really study pitcher usage and pitch counts, has written a treatise on the subject that includes some history, his prior research and his current thinking.
- Vince Gennaro, who wrote Diamond Dollars: The Economics of Winning in Baseball and consults with several major league teams about player contracts and team economics, talks about some of the recent highlights and lowlifes in free agent contracts.
- Sean Smith revisits the subject of whether catchers can impact pitcher ERA, while Nick Steiner is going to use PITCHf/x data and his own game observations to analyze the issue of catchers framing pitches.
- Chris Jaffe has figured out the best and worst benches of all time, and he’s going to tell you who they were.
- John Walsh will revisit, in more detail, the question of umpire bias at the plate by using PITCHf/x data in even more detail.
- Jeremy Greenhouse also will use PITCHf/x data to delve even further into the question pitcher “stuff” and “command.”
- Larry Granville of Wezen-ball will present the things he found out while watching every single home run hit this year on videotape. He also has a terrific piece on today’s fan experience.
- Jeff Sackmann will use historical Marcel projections to uncover some of the best unexpected results and underlying trends in baseball history.
- Craig Calcaterra will present his skewed version of this year’s happenings.
- Tom Tango has three things he’s always wanted to finish researching.
- I’m going to talk about this year’s batted balls and WPA results.
- John Dewan will discuss team defense.
- Greg Rybarczyk will have his own findings from this year’s Hit Tracker results. Brian Borawski will review the year’s baseball business.
- Rob Neyer will have something but I’m not really sure yet what it will be. (Love the suspense.)
- Brandon Isleib will once again contribute his astounding feats of baseball trivia.
- Tuck will have several new toons spread throughout the book.
Did I mention that I submitted my article to Dave last week for the upcoming annual? It’s called: THREE THINGS I FINALLY DECIDED TO FINISH RESEARCHING. I thought I mentioned it, but I don’t see a blog post on it.
Anyway, those things are:
1. The secret to a low average on balls in play
2. Yankees without Mariano Rivera
3. Does a bad season at an old age mean something more than at a young age?
That last one was Jeter-inspired. I had alotta fun doing the research, and there’s some good takeaways.
Buy the book when it comes out. I’ve been contributing an article for each annual for the last 4 years. I’ve been doing it mostly because I like Dave, and I want to support the best sabermetric-centric book around. Hopefully, more saberists will pick up the mantle, because it’s getting harder to find things I can publicly research.
Simkus is the one that spearheaded the Negro Leagues data that found itself into Strat-o-matic. I think a sample newsletter is available on his site.
Eric Simon asks that question.
I dunno, but I’d start with Panas’ downloadable book for seven bucks.
Came across this site, and it looks pretty neat. This is the page about The Book, and the comments seem to hit the marks reasonably well.
May 16 22:50
Dodgers’ win reversed because Mattingly did not attest to proper score!
May 16 20:44
How to beat the shift
May 16 20:02
Sponsoring MLB jerseys
May 16 19:34
Now you frame it, now you don’t
May 16 16:56
Did Manny Pacquaio actually quote Leviticus?
May 16 16:06
Does changing your pitch frequency lead to substantial change in results?
May 16 14:18
Extra Innings: One-minute review
May 16 14:16
This particular criticism of UZR is unfounded
May 16 13:21
Psst… wanna intern for the Astros?
May 16 12:23
Arena wars
THREADS
May 16, 2012
Now you frame it, now you don’t
May 16, 2012
Dodgers’ win reversed because Mattingly did not attest to proper score!
May 16, 2012
Does changing your pitch frequency lead to substantial change in results?
May 16, 2012
Sponsoring MLB jerseys
May 15, 2012
Andre The Hawk Dawson speaks
May 15, 2012
Euro 2012 Preview
May 15, 2012
How to beat the shift
May 15, 2012
Will Pujols end the season with at least 30 HR and .500 SLG?
May 15, 2012
Kershaw v Strasburg, part 2
May 15, 2012
Did Manny Pacquaio actually quote Leviticus?
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