THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

For the Turocy paper, jump straight to page 10:

The exercise of turning strategies “on” and “off” in Tables 3 and 4, while artificial, helps to illuminate the mechanisms determining the value of the game. Adding the sacrifice bunt always makes batting last more attractive, holding fixed the availability of other strategies. Similarly, adding the intentional walk always makes batting first more attractive. The effect of the stolen base, in which both teams are taking actions, is ambiguous, regardless of whether the offensive players are stronger at stealing bases.

Does one have to be a member to view these articles?  The registration form seems to want you to be a library employee.
vr, Xeifrank

Just enter “none” for institution and “non-academic researcher” and it’ll let you download.

The NBA and rest article said being on the road or having a long road trip is a disadvantage. However, it was small (practically statistically insignificant it said). Conclusion- shut up Beckett.

The park factors article was sweet. It ripped apart ESPN for sloppy data entry mistakes and not even finishing putting in all of the data for one year-just stopping near the end. Conclusion- ESPN’s numbers are inflated with hitting numbers. They provide another method to calculate park factors more closely.Conclusion 2- shut up ESPN.

I read the park factor paper a while ago. I forgot about the “bad data” thing.

ESPN is of course anti-sabermetric (pro BS actually), and I don’t mean that they are overtly anti-sabermetric - I mean that almost all of their TV shows and online journalists are purveyors of everything I rail against - all the crap and yap that has little basis in fact and truth - like listening to a snake oil salesman in the 19th century.

If we can’t even believe in their numbers, that is really bad.  ESPN should NOT be making data entries and being sloppy in the numbers they present in their “stats” sections.  If they want to be sloppy with numbers in their articles, I can live with that.  But not in their stats sections.  Serious researchers, including myself, use those numbers, and treat them as the gospel, as they should.