Baseball's All-Time Best Sluggers: Adjusted Batting Performance from Strikeouts to Home Runs [Hardcover]

Michael J. Schell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 7, 2005

Over baseball history, which park has been the best for run scoring?¹ Which player would lose the most home runs after adjustments for ballpark effect?² Which player claims four of the top five places for best individual seasons ever played, based on all-around offensive performance.³ (See answers, below).

These are only three of the intriguing questions Michael Schell addresses in Baseball's All-Time Best Sluggers, a lively examination of the game of baseball using the most sophisticated statistical tools available. The book provides an in-depth evaluation of every major offensive event in baseball history, and identifies the players with the 100 best seasons and most productive careers. For the first time ever, ballpark effects across baseball history are presented for doubles, triples, right- and left-handed home-run hitting, and strikeouts. The book culminates with a ranking of the game's best all-around batters.

Using a brisk conversational style, Schell brings to the plate the two most important credentials essential to producing a book of this kind: an encyclopedic knowledge of baseball and a professional background in statistics. Building on the traditions of renowned baseball historians Pete Palmer and Bill James, he has analyzed the most important factors impacting the sport, including the relative difficulty of hitting in different ballparks, the length of hitters' careers, the talent pool from which players are drawn, player aging, and changes in the game that have raised or lowered major-league batting averages.

Schell's book finally levels the playing field, giving new credit to hitters who played in adverse conditions, and downgrading others who faced fewer obstacles. It also provides rankings based on players' positions. For example, Derek Jeter ranks 295th out of 1,140 on the best batters list, but jumps to 103rd in the position-adjusted list, reflecting his offensive prowess among shortstops.

Replete with dozens of never-before reported stories and statistics, Baseball's All-Time Best Sluggers will forever shape the way baseball fans view the greatest heroes of America's national pastime.

Answers: 1. Coors Field 2. Mel Ott 3. Barry Bonds, 2001-2004 seasons

Editorial Reviews

Review

Baseball fans, ever fascinated with statistics, should enjoy rifling through this information-packed work. -- Library Journal



Michael J. Schell has produced what may be the most rigorous effort yet to compare baseball players from various eras. And in the process, he has offered a tantalizing suggestion that steroids may not have affected the game as much as many people assume. -- Christopher Shea, The Boston Globe

From the Inside Flap

"The way these things work, I don't suppose that Michael Schell's book will be the final word on ranking hitters. What I do know is that anybody who wants the final word will have to read this book first. And that will be the easy part."--Rob Neyer, ESPN.com

"Michael Schell has expanded on his original study of Baseball's All-Time Best Hitters to include all aspects of batting. He has written a well thought out and soundly based book, taking into account sophisticated time, age, park and positional adjustments to reach valid conclusions. There is plenty of math, but it is not necessary to understand the intricacies of the equations to appreciate the results."--Pete Palmer, co-editor of The Baseball Encyclopedia (with Gary Gillette) and co-author of The Hidden Game of Baseball (with John Thorn)

"Well-written and organized. Baseball's All-Time Best Sluggersstrikes the right balance between the statistical lingo of the professional statistician and the more familiar verbiage of baseball books."--Daniel Levitt, co-author, with Mark Armour, of Paths to Glory: How Great Baseball Teams Got That Way

"Some say it's impossible to compare hitters from different eras. In this book, Michael Schell meets that challenge head-on, using modern statistical methods to adjust for differences in eras, ballparks, and the level of competition. It may not settle every argument about the game's best all-time hitters, but it's sure to raise the quality of those arguments."--Tom Tippett, Principal Designer, Diamond Mind Baseball

"A significant contribution to the sabermetrics field. This book will be a fun read for any baseball fan."--Jim Albert, Bowling Green State University.

"Everyone knows that batting .300 in the major leagues is much harder than batting .300 in the minors. Although baseball rules and equipment change over time and parks differ, such differences in difficulty are ignored regularly by those who compare batters who played in different decades and/or in different stadiums. Michael Schell has painstakingly made the needed adjustments for eras, for park factors, for players' ages, and for variability in performances, so as to determine which batters really have been most dominant. There are many other treasures to be found here, and many methodological lessons to be learned and enjoyed by baseball enthusiasts and by those who think about player evaluations."--Carl Morris, Harvard University

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Princeton University Press (February 7, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691115575
• ISBN-13: 978-0691115573
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,690,454 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars michael schell's first book on statistical methods applied to baseball, February 20, 2008

By 

Michael R. Chernick "statman31147" (Holland PA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Baseball's All-Time Best Sluggers: Adjusted Batting Performance from Strikeouts to Home Runs (Hardcover)

Michael Schell is a professor of statistics at the University of North Carolina. I find that we have much in common. Like him, I work in biostatistics and also I am a great fan of baseball. An age old question in baseball is who is the greatest home run hitter of all time. Maturally Babe Ruth is usually the first name that comes to mind. At the time this book was written the use and affect of steroids on home run hitting was not as evident as it is today. The home run explosion of the 1990s with McGwire, Sosa and Bonds as the key sluggers was viewed as being based more on exceptional talent. We now know that all these players probably used steroids and steroid use may be a key factor in this performance.

Putting that aside Mike Schell uses classical statistical regression models to adjust home run total for effects that don't relate to talent. One of the most important factors is the nall park effect. Everyone knows that Boston's Fenway Park is far different in shape and home run potential than say Yankee Stadium or Dodger Stadium and before the idea of humidifying baseballs to compensate for the altitude Coors Stadium gave up the most home runs by far. Since ball players play half their games in their home park their home run total is naturally affected by the home field. So without adjustment for the home field it would be impossible to compare even contemporary sluggers among themselves. With DiMaggio being a right hand hitter playing in Yankee Stadium the ball park hurt his home run production. As a left handed pull hitter in Fenway park Williams did not reap the advantages of the left field Green Monster. Yankee Stadium favored left hand pull hitters thus helping hitters like Roger Maris but hurting the right hand power alley hitters like DiMaggio. One interesting question is how would Williams playing for the Yankees and DiMaggio for the Red Sox have affexted their hone run production. The models that Schell develops in this book could be used to construct "statistical" answers to such questions.

However, I think his main goal was to rank the all time best home run hitters adjusting for the home field and the era in which the player played the game. The results are interesting and sometimes lead to big surprises.

Later on Mike ventured into the question of who the best hitters were using similar models. This was the subject of his second book in which he claimed that Tony Gwynn and not Ty Cobb was the all-time greatest hitter based on the rankings derived from the models.

For home runs Bonds clearly stood out over the rest. In his best years he got record numbers of walks including an amazing number of intentional walks. This meant that his amazing home run total came with the handicap of not getting as many opportunities to hit compared to an average player. Today's skeptics could rightly say that it was steroids as much or more than talent that gave him the opportunity to produce so many home runs.

Other books similar to this one including Schell's other book and those of Albert and Bennett along with a number of publications by other statisticians and Bill James have demonstrated that statistics has a legitimate place in the science of sports and particularly in baseball.

This is a very interesting book and it gives an easy to read approach to statistical methods that the techniques themselves get a lot of attention. Statistical courses that use baseball examples make it pleasant and easy to learn the fundamental statistics concepts. Albert published a baseball book with this theme.

32 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best analysis of baseball statistics ever!, March 20, 2005

By 

Charles Ashbacher (Marion, Iowa United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Baseball's All-Time Best Sluggers: Adjusted Batting Performance from Strikeouts to Home Runs (Hardcover)

One of the rules that I have lived by in my life is that time spent arguing baseball is by definition not wasted. Discussions over who was the best player ever are always subject to a myriad of scientific prejudices. It depends on your personal formulas in rating the relative values of the different kinds of hits, how you rate a walk and the value you associate with a stolen base. This book provides an enormous amount of analysis that assigns weights to those events and also incorporates other differences, such as the era of the player and the parks that he played in.
As all fans know, the home park makes an enormous difference in the batting statistics of a player. A right-handed power hitter has an advantage in Fenway Park, as does a left-handed batter in Yankee stadium. The Houston Astrodome is a major liability for all power hitters and Coors field is a friend to all. Schell incorporates these differences in his analysis and then uses a weighted formula that includes all possible offensive contributions to create a ranking of the top 100 batters of all time. The top five are in order: Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, Rogers Hornsby, Barry Bonds and Lou Gehrig. He also computes clutch performance and adjusts for the effect of position on the field, including the designated hitter. While there are no surprises in the top ten, there was one omission that surprised me. All-time hits leader Pete Rose is not in the list and I didn't even find his name in the index of the book.
This is one of the best baseball books of all time, although you do need to know something about statistics to understand the presentations. There are many charts, tables and graphs that reinforce the points being made. From now on, this book is my reference bible when the discussion turns to determining who was the better player.

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One nice piece of work and a great presentation, May 7, 2005

By 

RoyHobbs (Buffalo NY) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Baseball's All-Time Best Sluggers: Adjusted Batting Performance from Strikeouts to Home Runs (Hardcover)

Schell states the problem, tells you how he's going to analyze the problem and then presents a great read. If you want the details, there included at the end of the book. Just a great approach with solid logic. Two additional points:
1. If you are playing Fantasy Baseball (especially "Old-Timer") then you need this book and the Bill James Historical Abstract. Any other book is a very distant 3rd.
2. For baseball statistics/methods, this book is the best book out there and is addictive. That's why I bought it and I've been spending hours reading this book.
It's an excellent reference and I can't find any fault with it.