THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Wouldn’t it be easier to just publish it as a google doc?

It wouldn’t be easier for me, no.

If MGL wants to, he can go for it.  Though I remember having problems in the past with any document greater than 500KB.

My funny pictures are missing from the HTML doc.  Those weird captions reference the pictures.

For “weaknesses” under UZR you have “none”. I would at least put “cannot be used for historical comparisons”.  This is weakness, if you consider it such (I do), for all metrics that require detailed zone evalaution data, that will simply never exist before the last few years.  I would also add: “subjective element of assigning zones”.  For all their limitations, metrics that rely on stats such as assists, putouts, Ks, balls in play, etc. are purely objective: an out occurs or does not, fielders participates in outs or they don’t, balls are in play or not—these records are not only availabe through most of baseball history, they are also relatively simple facts, not requiring subjective evaluations of what “zone” a ball falls in, whether it’s a “line drive” or a “fly ball”, etc..  Metrics such as UZR are extremely useful, but I don’t think we should treat them as flawless.

#4, that was just a joke.

When I read the captions, I was like “okay, what the hell is going on? Am I missing something?”

But anyway… were most of the presentations similar to this? Were they more/less sophisticated? I wanted to attend when I first heard about it, but now I feel like it would have been less informative for most of the readers of this blog.

I don’t know about the other presentations, but yes, this was for high school and middle school students with little or no experience with baseball analysis.  We did have an open Q&A session for the guest attendees though.

Were they overwhelmed or intrigued?  Did any of them actually come to this site?

may there be something similar to this in the future? I wanted to go but never had the time to make the trip (from nyc). maybe it could be like a weeklong thing so you could go more in depth as well. im a high school senior and I would definitely be interested in something like that, and I bet others would be as well.

Weeklong?  More in-depth?  I hope MIT has a big budget.

Wow.  You guys are just plain wacky!

I don’t really know much about it.  You’d have to talk to Chuck Korb at the Sons of Sam Horn website.  Or e-mail him at .