THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

This was the Baseball Digest issue:

http://books.google.com/books?id=DDQDAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA57&dq="linear%20weights"%20"pete%20palmer"%20"baseball%20digest"&pg=PA56#v=onepage&q&f=false

If you read that, you can see how some mainstream media would write an article just like that today.  That was written in 1983, but really, could just as well be written today in most newspapers.

Moneyball is always noted as the “gateway” book, but I think a lot of older material might suffice as well if he wants to give it a shot on his own. I agree with Tango in that you can’t force it upon him, but check out stuff like the Neyer/James guide to pitching, Fantasyland, and Tango/MGL’s “The Book” as well. Baseball Between The Numbers (a BP production) and The Extra 2% are also strong reads.

I would recommend starting him on a book like Moneyball or Fantasyland, merely because they are more narratives than pure stats, so its a good introduction to see if the topic is of interest without throwing too many heavy concepts and numbers out there. FIreJoeMorgan is also a good place to mix fun with smart

I think that most sabermetricians become passionate about the game first - *then* get into the numbers. So I think Bill’s suggestion is spot on - if the kid wants to read, he should read books about baseball, not specifically about sabermetrics. (I think Matt Christopher is the author to whom Bill was referring - I remember a lot of those books when I was a kid.)

I also agree with Tom’s point, although I think it’s a little harder for a kid to play nowadays when almost everything is organized to death and parents rarely let their kids just go out and play.

I used to scour my uncles’ rooms for those Who’s Who books (had several from the 60’s I think) so I could create teams using real stats for my Commodore 64 baseball game. Then I got the Baseball Encyclopedia for my birthday...best present ever (or tied with the Millennium Falcon anyway.) I was about 9 or 10.

My son is 1, and once he is of baseball age, I plan to just do what was done for me - give him lots of positive opportunities and exposure to fall in love with the game. 

*Family trips to the Coliseum and to Pac Bell

*Buy him complete sets of baseball cards for birthdays/Xmas (that’s how I fell in love with stats, and it helped me a lot in math class at young ages, too).

*Be available as often as I can to go outside and play catch.

If a kid has enough positive experiences with that kind of stuff, I think he’ll eventually develop an appreciation too.  At the least he’ll understand his dad’s obsession better once he’s a grown man. 

It was Duane Decker who wrote the books Bill referred to.  I gobbled those up as a kid.

I was five. I fell in love watching my local team in a pennant race. Pretty soon after that, my parents started buying the local paper, primarily because (though I didn’t know this was the reason at the time) they knew I would read the sports section, basically to follow baseball. I remember reading the section where they listed out all the league leaders in various categories in both leagues, then figuring out what the different stats were and why they were important.
I got this longing in my head (though again, I wasn’t able to articulate it at the time) that I wanted to be able to basically simulate a game - figure out how many runs each team would be expected to score, with fairly basic information about the players.
Sometime around my senior year of high school, I came up with a statistic which, looking back, was pretty similar to wOBA; my weights were -.25 for an out, .4 for a walk, .5 for a single, .7 for a double, .8 for a triple, and 1 for a homer (PAs in the denominator). Needless to say, I came up with those numbers off the top of my head, but looking back, I like that they were at least halfway reasonable.
When I was in college, I came up with the per-inning run expectancies of teams where every batter was the same, and only walked or struck out at a given frequency, for 3 bases, 2 bases (a good approximation of singles), 1 base (a good approximation of doubles), or only home (exactly home runs, of course). I then tried to combine these in a somewhat crude fashion, and got an overall run expectancy for any team. And it’s pretty good. I’ve been playing around with it recently, and, though it underguesses everything by 10-15%, it’s got pretty good correlation - on the order of r=.97. Of course, Tango’s Markov-based simulator does everything this did, only with a little baserunning to boot.
Oh yeah, baseball inspired me to learn some math, too. When one of my physics professors was going over how computers worked, as state machines, I was the only one who knew what Markov chains were. And when I found out about the sabermetric movement, I was surprised people hadn’t been doing this stuff for 100 years. And when I got The Book, it was like finding a piece of buried treasure.
So, as for reading, I would suggest people’s columns about teams, and following those teams on the TV or (my preference) the radio. Going to games when possible is also good of course. I think every (or most every) good sabermetrician has their love for sabermetrics grounded in a love for baseball, which probably stemmed from following a team (or maybe the game in general) as a kid.

Ah, yes, the Who’s Who with the red borders. Very much akin to the Baseball Register when The Sporting News was in its prime. Much the same info in each, but the ink in the brand-new Registers smelled better.

At an early age, playing and watching is the way to spark the interest.  Growing up in Chicago, I often had the opportunity to watch two games a day.  The entire family watched just about every White Sox game.  And in the summer I could also watch the Cubs in the daytime (if I wasn’t out playing).

As for the saber-exposure, I started getting a subscription to The Spoting News around age 9 (chock full of stats).  Then I started getting the TSN Guide, Register and Dope Book.  In the summer of 82 I had an appendectomy and I remember that I had got a copy of either Sport or Inside Sports, while recovering in the hospital.  It happened to be their annual Tom Boswell Total Average issue.  Shortly after that, I found Bill James’ Abstracts and the Hidden Game.  I was hooked.

I forgot about the Boswell Total Average.  Yes, I was definitely hooked on that, and it helped that Tim Raines did great there.

I don’t remember when was the first time I got that, but it was probably right around that same time.