THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Trying to take a guess as to the readership, I think that the breakdown will be
:

10, 20, 5, 60, 5

:
(If you’ve voted: Highlight the area between the two colons.)

Somehow I think the poll is subject to selection bias. Also I think you are being too (blank). I think (blank) readers than that have read the book.

Definitely selection bias.  People who come here at least enjoy the blog, so I’m hitting a very select group.  And certainly the reader is more likely to have bought The Book than a harlequin.

Boy was your prediction off. 

Well at least now we know why he needs a monkey…

What you folks need to do is to get all the sabermetric tomes translated into Japanese. Because sweet Jesus you can’t buy most of them over on this side of the pond, and it’s depressing. The shipping from US Amazon is $45, which is oppressively costly for a book!

How about “I liked the book, don’t mind the blog, but hate the authors?” Why isn’t that a selection?

You should only believe half of what you read about yourself on BTF, MGL.

#6:

As far as I know, not much Japanese baseball sources on internet and publications are about sabermetrics. (who knows where can you find Ichiro’s split stats or Tokyo Dome’s park factor? Unbelievable)

I live in Taiwan and I bought The Book on our bookstore website (we have no local Amazon here) and it’s still available there. In my conservative estimation, at least 50 Taiwaneses bought The Book. (more than Hawaii & Alaska I guess) And guess what? I think 50 of them enjoy this book and can’t wait for “The Book II” to be published like me.

I always get a kick when I look at my logs and see sites I don’t recognize linking here, like this one:
http://www.plus-blog.sportsnavi.com/rahmian/article/479

You’ll notice plenty of references to UZR, and if you see the “Bordick” text, you’ll know there’s some cut/pasting of MGL’s original article on UZR.

The rest, of course, is, well… Chinese to me.

...and can’t wait for “The Book II” to be published like me.

The Book was a labor.  It started as a labor of love and then it was a labor.  As with most authors I imagine, after finishing a book, I said “never again”.

We spent roughly a month per chapter.  I did anyway.  Say about 10 hours a week for 3-4 weeks.  If I do 4-6 chapters, that’s 6 months right there.  Not bad, but then the worse process in the whole thing was the editing and typsetting.  A real nightmare.  We spent over a month on that process, if not more.  It was never-ending.  Add it up, and we’re talking about a good 500 hours for me.  The three of us combined probably spent a thousand hours, if not more.  Book sales have been pretty strong (as many books sold in 08 as 07, and more than 06).  So, it has staying power.  We probably made (or will make anyway) say 20$ per hour.  Pretty good for a hobby I suppose, but it was all overtime.  I’m not sure I could devote that kind of time and effort again.

I might consider doing a repackaging of all my published work to make it tighter and more coherent, but that seems like a step back at this point.  Not really moving forward.

Ideally, someone would come along, pay my salary for a year, I’ll take a sabbatical from my real job, work from home (or library anyway, otherwise my kid would never let go of me) and I’d devote myself entirely to baseball.

Anyway, I’m very proud of The Book.  It was written to hold up against time and not be dated.  The “Book box says” makes it very easy to flip through the book without being bogged down.  I don’t think there’s anything in the process or flow I would have changed given hindsight.  It is an impossible book to read through one sitting (and even some chapters are impossible to read in one sitting).  All of that is by design.

Anyway…

I just voted and went with ‘liked’ but wanted to add that that’s in ‘tough’ mode, compared to (imagined) potential or to the best baseball reading experiences I’ve had (which would include some of y’all’s internet posts).  ‘Loved’ is a strong word and you didn’t give a ‘really liked’ option.  Feel encouraged to switch it to ‘loved!’ if it’d be useful to compare it to a replacement- level baseball stat book.  I also ‘really like’ the blog.

And I’d be *delighted* to buy an extra-coherence repackaging of your various work or parts thereof, and certainly also of MGL’s.

I’m glad you seem to not be feeling quite as bad / burned out about the writing process as you did immediately after it.

I probably seem to you people like the evil specter of funny pictures, since for some reason baseball stats people always use tables instead of figures - even when they expect no one to actually look at the numbers and are just trying to prove a point with them.

But, I think if I had one suggestion to improve The Book would be to find some places where a figure would have really have helped the reader grasp a particular interaction or change as a result of making a particular move.

I felt like the tables were a fantastic reference in many cases, but while reading I wasn’t out to memorize numbers so much as I was out to see what the numbers in the table said to get a good grasp of the data, and a figure would have been much better for that sort of thing.

I guess it might just be a disciplinary or training thing (obviously, as you guys see, I have a heavy slant towards figures), but I feel like there were a few places where you could have either added a supplementary figure or swapped a table for one and it would have been easier on the reader.

Nevertheless, the Book was a great read.

Dan,

On that, I agree with you.  It would have been ideal say with the SB breakeven points, and a few places. 

My only issue was that if we made the graphic, and it didn’t come out looking nice, it might have looked too cheesy in the printing process.  That was my only concern.

After 180 votes, the results:

a. Of the people who bought the book, 98% liked or loved it, and 2% didn’t like it.  Thank you!  We really appreciate the response, both in this survey and all the personal messages we’ve received.

b. Of the people who didn’t buy the book, 95% like coming here, and 5% don’t. 

Why would someone who doesn’t like coming here, come back here?  Is there a hope that we’ll change something?  We’re pretty much going to keep doing what we are doing.  Now, we can try to make things more pleasant for people, if they voice whatever concern they have.  But, I imagine those people already somewhat like coming here to begin with.

My best advice for those 2 people who voted that they don’t like coming here: gracefully leave, and look for some other place to go.  Seriously.  We don’t appeal to everyone, and we’re not going to.

c. 78% of the voters have bought the book.  That is insanely high, and judging by book sales (good, but not top tier) and unique visitors count, we can only presume that most of the voters were “the regulars”, and so leans a clear bias to those who already bought the book.

Anyway, thank you for indulging me, and we’re open to whatever suggestions you may have.