THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

One of the proudest of my achievements, shoving pages into a scanner ...

Is there a way to easily download all 40 of those at once for offline reading?  A .zip file or something similar would be much appreciated.

If you want a chuckle, look at my April 1987 article on wins above replacement.

Wins above average, you mean. 

Why should we chuckle?  Is there something obviously wrong with it that I missed?  Looks good to me ...

The October, 1988 edition has a great review of Player Win Averages.  It’s by a guy named Paul Pudaite and goes seven single-spaced pages.  He nicely anticipates many of the discussions we still have today and even anticipates and outlines the formula for Leverage Index.  Very fun read.

Phil/4, yeah, WAA (I haven’t read it since I sent it in 1987). The chuckle is not that it’s wrong, it’s that ‘we’ve come a long way, baby!’

Any chance Bill would allow the Baseball Abstract Newsletters to also be made available?  I have the complete set myself, but I’m sure many people have never even seen them.

Studes is right--the Pudaite article is great, given its date. It really isn’t out of place even today…

The timing of this is kind of funny. I did some house cleaning last weekend and threw out a big heavy box of these Baseball Analyst issues--I haven’t looked at them in 20 years. And now they are available on the net, should the occasion arise

Dave - I think a bunch of people would have paid to take those off your hands.

Phil - How did you get permission to scan them?  I would definitely consider doing the same with my copies of the original abstracts.  Would love to see KJOK/7 do the Newsletters as well!

Craig: I e-mailed Bill.  He was happy to have them distributed. 

I doubt he’d give permission for free distribution of his own books, though.

To answer my own question, I’m guessing permission would have to be granted from Random House, unlike the Analyst newsletters, which were totally self-published by Bill.

The first article in the first edition was on park factors for errors and double plays - which is something I’m revisiting for the THT Forecasts. I’ll make sure to read that article (from 1982).