THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Monday, November 12, 2007

Peter Gammons

I was a huge Redsox fan as a kid, and Gammons’ book (Beyond the Sixth Game) was one of the very first baseball books I ever read.  I loved it.  (My first baseball book was “How the Expos Almost Won The Pennant”.) Anyway, when we came up with our shortlist of baseball people we were going to hand out review copies of The Book, Gammons was the second on the list (after Neyer).  I managed to get his email address, and his Blackberry-ed me right away.  He sounded very enthused.  Basically, he’s perceived as a “friend of sabermetrics”.

Recently, he said this:

Pedroia gave up his scholarship at Arizona State to free up money to sign a much-needed pitcher, so when the Sun Devils reached the College World Series, coaches and players had “DP” on their caps in honor of their leader who never got to Omaha. The sabermetrics guys in their garages never understand these things.

If you read the sentence in its grammatical sense, that is, of the sabermetric guys who are in their garages they never understand these things, then that’s likely a true statement.  But, how many people in the world is that?  Two, three?  Clearly, that’s not what he meant.  He meant: since the sabermetric guys are in their garages they never understand these things.  What an insult.  I love baseball.  And I’d love it, even if we never kept score of anything.  When I was a teenager, we’d play double-headers and triple-headers.  It’s the love of baseball that drives sabermetricians.  We’d give up our garages and computers if we could play every day.  Of mainstream media with their heads up their @sses, they never understand these things.