Baseball's Brave New Statistical World

I'm currently reading Baseball between the Numbers: Why Everything You Know about the Game Is Wrong, put together by the people behind the excellent baseball statistics site Baseball Prospectus. If you read Michael Lewis's Moneyball and are hungry for more cutting-edge baseball thinking, I'd heartily recommend this book. While they do get into some heavy math explaining the latest baseball statistical analysis, these data are used to examine some of baseball's most basic questions, such as whether or not a team's lineup matters, whether or not baseball needs a salary cap, or whether or not Alex Rodriguez is overpaid. Using sometimes dry numerical methods in the service of such fascinating questions is what makes this book really work.

What the thinking baseball fan loves about sabermetrics (the nickname for the new "generation" of baseball statistics that have been in use since the 1970s) is that they dissect the game down to the constituent parts and really make you think about the game on the most basic level. Instead of accepting the hackneyed wisdom of TV analysts and grandparents who long for the Dodgers to return to Brooklyn, this new approach to baseball allows the interested fan to get some new perspectives on the game, which are truly exciting and valuable. You watch a game and see your favorite player strike out in a big spot and you think, "Geez, what a dope! Couldn't he at least have hit the ball?" and then you read Baseball between the Numbers and you learn that oftentimes a strikeout is less dangerous than a groundball, because of the chance of a double play. That's a very small issue, but even something like that expands and enlivens my experience of the game, revealing layers of possible interpretations I never even thought possible.