THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Yeah I reviewed his book the other day at Statistically Speaking.  Geoff and I had been working on our books at the same time and he offered a ton of help with the process.  It takes a lot of balls to quit your job, as Geoff did, in order to put out a book that may or may not sell designed for a niche audience.

This book is a must-read for anybody in the Padres organization and us bloggers/sabermetricians/fans of baseball who write on the interwebs should spend the measly 18.95 or 9.95 download price in support.

Thanks, guys, for the kind words. Tom, I look forward to hearing your thoughts on the book after you’ve had a chance to read it. My goal is to keep improving each year, so all feedback is welcome!

I’ve been remiss in offering my thoughts on the Ducksnorts Annual.

I’ll go through each section, and tell you the kind of person that would and would not like each.

1. Foreword (1 pages).  Nice, sober reading from a non-yapper for a non-yapper.

2. Intro (1 page).  Humble.  Anyone would like.

3. Review (31 pages). Good review of behind-the-scenes moves.  Page 12 has a good recap of a sabermetric play, but then I didn’t like his throwing out that Maddux implodes after 5 innings without backing it up.  Page 15 does what I like, showing run differential by inning.  Padres scored 37 more runs than they allowed in the 9th, far and away their best differential in any inning.  Thanks to Hoffman et al.  I would have liked to see the breakdown by pitchers here.  Again page 15 about the implosion of Maddux after 75 pitches, and this time including David Wells.  No evidence still. 

I’d like to see an aging pattern by inning for old pitchers.  They must look different than young pitchers, wouldn’t they?

Oooh… great chart on page 15, showing the relief support by starter.  So, Maddux had 2.67 relievers per game with 45 pitches, while Wells had 3.41 with 68 pitches.  (Geoff: you can show integers for pitches.) Geoff notes that we have issues with extra inning games.  Therefore, that chart should be changed to the first 9 innings.  Reliever usage after that shouldn’t be dependent on the starter really.

Not too crazy about the split stats on page 18, by first/second half.  I’d rather see multi-year totals here.

He talks about player moves.  In most cases, they are just factual statements, meaning anyone could have written them.  But in other cases, only a fan following the Padres would know, like when he says: “Bocachica hit just one home run with the Padres, but he crushed several other balls that hooked foul; unfortunately those don’t count for anything.” In 3 years, the other player comments could still be written, but this one could only be written in the year it happened.

Ah, finally, page 24 talks about Maddux tiring. “Small sample or not, that is ugly.”.  It was 77 PA.  One SD of wOBA is 57 points (.057).  His performance was a bit over 2 SD from the mean, so there is a cause for concern.  But, all that means is that he is worse than usual, and NOT THAT bad.  Let’s say you are a .320 OBP guy, but you are .440 in 77 PA in some condition.  We’ll call that “statistically significant”.  But, if you were a .350 OBP guy, that .440 would not be “statistically significant”.  Ignoring the “either/or” aspect of the significance statement I made, all it’s saying is that his performance in the former case IS worse than expected. HOWEVER, it’s not .440 that is his real talent level there. It’ll be something like .330 or .340, since .if he was really .350, then .440 would NOT be his true talent level. Basically, even if his OBP was .600 in those 77 PA, his true talent in those conditions is STILL somewhere between .320 and .600.

On page 26, he talks about the improved range of Greene, by interpreting year-by-year fielding numbers.  You can’t spot trends in those numbers.  I would rather have read about an account of his fielding by him and the fans, things that I couldn’t do myself.

He also shows the 2004-07 home/road splits of Greene, which are fairly large.  Typically, you don’t have “true” home/road splits, but Greene may be ideally suited against Petco based on the numbers, possibly.  More study would be warranted here.  Bonds for example isn’t hampered like other lefty hitters by the post-Candlestick Park. (How depressing that I don’t know the name of the current park, but I know the old name.)

Page 29: “It seems weird to think that at the ripe old age of 26, Jake Peavy is the Padres’ all-time career leader in strikeouts, but that’s the truth.” Wow.

Ok, I’m stopping reading now.  It looks like you don’t need to be a Padres fan at all to enjoy the read.  The pace is fairly good.  You are not overwhelmed.  There are a few places where I would simply just take things out of the book, and expand the other more interesting things (especially from a sabermetric point of view).  It does help if you enjoy reading about some of the players (Maddux, Peavy, Greene, Gonzalez, Hoffman).  They are interesting players in their own right.

I’m not sure what kind of person wouldn’t like this book (to this point anyway). 

It’s clear to me in reading BP, THT, and this book, that this format is the best way to talk about a team.  If you try to condense something, then you really need to pick as few topics as you can, and just focus on those. 

He’s also devoid of sounding like he’s got “expertise”, which is good, since most people sound like yappers when they talk about stuff, and there’s little yapping in this book.

FWIW, I am a dog lover, but I hate yapping dogs.