THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

I encountered it once at a local library and skimmed it briefly. I can’t say anything good about it, but I also can’t say anything bad about it. If I had to hazard a guess I’d say it’s a good book that most readers of this site wouldn’t get much use out of, but I could be wrong.

It’s apparently a 176 page paperback written by three academics.  Quite pricey for a paperback.  Remarkable that it’s been out for a year and there’s only the one review (which tells us nothing unless we know the reviewer’s tastes and can compare them to our own) on Amazon.  Oddly, the number one book bought along with it is . . . The Book.

I definitely think that there is a need for a Sabermetrics 101 Book, so I was just wondering if anyone had read this one. I assumed it was brand new since I had never heard of it and never heard it mentioned in any sabmermetric venues.

I Googled the authors and all I came up with, other than the book, was that they are professors of mathematics.  No other sabermetric work that I could find, although I think that one of the authors wrote some baseball related papers.

Really pricey for a paperback (34.95).  Heck, our Book is dirt cheap compared to theirs…

Eric Seidman’s book is supposed to be a good “101” type of sabermetrics book, no?

I think Eric’s book is designed to appeal to the math-averse, while this book likely does not.

Since the writers are professors, maybe they use this at a text for a course on sabermetrics similar to the Tufts course. The price make sense in that scenario (not that it’s a fair price).

I don’t know what a “fair” price for a book is.  I guess whatever you can get.  Textbooks are very expensive because they have a “captive market” (students don’t have much of a choice), but I can’t imagine too many people who are not students in a sabermetric course buying this book for the price they are charging, given what similar books cost.  It is not like a high price is a rip-off though.  Given the amount of work we put in to The Book, we should charge about $100 per copy.  But, you can’t get that for a book like that.  You can only charge what people are willing to pay.  For a book like this, if you can get 3,000 people to fork over 15 to 20 dollars, I would guess that only 500-1000 people (maybe less) will fork over 30 dollars.

Mr. Costa is a Catholic chaplain and math doctorate who teaches at the United States Military Academy at West Point where I attend school and plan to take the Sabermetrics class taught by him in my next (and senior!) year. He’s also hilarious and awesome.

I bought the book last year at a book signing he did in our bookstore and subsequently read it. Very basic stuff, but useful for someone who has zero prior experience. Does a lot of analysis that would be questionable at best by all of our standards, but the overall idea (searching for objective baseball knowledge) and particularly the section on linear weights is a great introduction to that topic for a newcomer to the concept.

On the price--isn’t that a McFarland thing?  I don’t know much about the publisher, except that they publish a lot of baseball books, and most of them seem pricey for paperbacks.  Most of them are on esoteric subjects, relative to the usual mass-market baseball book.  (Though you could say the same about The Book, and it is a bargain by comparison, as you say.)

I think Chris Jaffe’s book on managers will be published by McFarland.

In my last post, I implied that the book was priced “incorrectly.” That was a stupid comment given that the price, as puck points out, is set by the publisher. Given that they do that for a living (set prices) and I know nothing about publishing, I have to take back that aspect of my last post.  All I can say is that it seems like it is overpriced compared to similar books.

Change of Topic Alert - Does anyone know who Gabriel Costa, Michael Huber and John Saccoman are?  I just got a notice from Amazon that their new book Practicing Sabermetrics will be available on June 30th.  Apparently, they previously wrote Understanding Sabermetrics.  Is anyone familiar with that book?

The new book is also $29.95.  I guess somebody must have bought the first one.

Here’s the “About the Authors” snippet from McFarland publishing…

Gabriel B. Costa iis professor of mathematical sciences at the United States Military Academy at West Point, where he is also an associate chaplain. Michael R. Huber is a professor of Mathematics at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania. John T. Saccoman is a professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at Seton Hall University in New Jersey.