Customer Reviews

The Hidden Game of Baseball

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This book was great for its time, and it's still very interesting and well worth a look. It was probably the first such comprehensive effort to evaluate and rank the players of all time using "sabermetrics," and for some years it remained the main such source and the main reference point for future efforts. I guess the high current prices for the book reflect this.

The methods have basic flaws, which have since been widely pointed out and (I believe) widely acknowledged. For example, the basic unit of measurement is "Linear Weights," in which each accomplishment, whether it be a single, home run, putout, assist, or anything else, is given a "weight," and then they are added together, and the total is normalized. But, as Bill James pointed out with an elegance that's hard to top, the method was doomed to be painfully limited, because "baseball offense isn't linear; it's geometric" -- meaning that the elements of offense combine in a way that goes beyond simply adding them together, plus that each event has an impact on the likelihood of the next event.

But the main flaw is that being "average" is used as the center for everything. Everyone is scored according to how far above or below average he is. The problem is that players who are "average" are assumed to have no value, and are given zero; players who are calculated to be below average are given "negative value." So, if someone has a long and successful career but is found to be below average (example: Bobby Richardson), he winds up with "negative value," which is as though he's worse than nothing, worse than someone who plays just a couple of innings and gets released. Obviously, this is wrong, even if he truly was below average (which Richardson wasn't). An average player isn't a zero -- he has A LOT of value; and even a below-average player can have value. As has been pointed out, pennants are lost every year because of a team's inability to find even just an adequate player for a certain position -- for example, a decent-fielding third baseman who might hit .250 with 10 home runs, or a serviceable #5 starter who can give you some decent innings. This doesn't mean that the ratings are useless. They seem to be fairly good for showing who was better than whom in a given season (although not in the Bobby Richardson example), but not so good for ranking careers. And "zero" or "negative" doesn't really mean what it seems to mean.

The methods that are used for rating defense are EXTREMELY flawed and give some odd results, such as that Roy Smalley was one of the great-fielding shortstops of all time and that Richie Ashburn was better than Willie Mays. But the methods were an important step toward future advances.

Some of the more recent books, such as Bill James' "Historical Abstract" and "Win Shares," are far more state-of-the-art. But this book remains of interest, for its historical significance and for how it helped to frame the subsequent work on the subject. And, not long from now, we'll probably be talking about how outdated those other two books are too.

Overall, this is a valuable book to a baseball historian. I learned what the actual lefty righty variations are in batting averages, homers, and walks. In other words, how lefty pitching affects lefty hitting, etc. And I learned how people hit when they have worked themselves into different ball-strike counts. The best batting averages come at the count of 3-1. There is a lot of emphasis on fielding range as measured by how many balls the fielders managed to get to.

In such a comprehensive book you want to believe everything in it and accept it as some kind of Bible. But you'd better not. The book has a few flaws in it.

For example, it ranks Sandy Koufax as a non-entity. While admitting that his pitching was good, it rips him to shreds because he couldn't hit, and wasn't a great fielder either. My reaction is so what if he couldn't hit. And as for his fielding, first of all, when you strike out so many hitters you don't get as many chances to field the ball, and second of all, pitchers handle so few batted balls to begin with that the sampling isn't that significant. If your system ends up saying Koufax was nothing, there is something wrong with your system. Koufax was among the elite of baseball history. I rank him as the second best pitcher who ever lived, behind Walter Johnson. He was God on the mound, and you don't just brush that off. He was more devastating than Randy Johnson. He had the best curve ball I've ever seen. If you went against him, you lost. The SF Giants didn't want to match Marichal against Koufax. Why waste Marichal on an automatic loss. Believe me, they would have matched Marichal against anyone else. To put my comments in perspective, I was never a Dodger fan.

This updated version of The Hidden Game of Baseball is a great addition to any baseball library, whether the fan be of the casual variety or the die-hard. It introduces the reader to a new and unique way of rating the players of today and yesterday and can even be used to compare players from different eras to determine who really was the best: Mark McGwire or Babe Ruth? A must read! Highly recommended!

I always loved the stolen base. My first happy moments in baseball were watching Jackie Robinson get on base and feeling the crowd at Ebbett's Field go crazy with anticipation.
Well, it turns out that stealing a base is a pretty low-percentage play: probably not worth the risk. Nuts. But stealing home looks pretty good, especially with two out. So does tagging up from third with two out and a long fly.
Discussions like this one, the righty-lefty pitching thing and the best analysis of batting order ever make this book a classic. Put it right up on the shelf next to Bill James.

Lynn Hoffman, author of the New Short Course in WineThe New Short Course in Wine

I have not read this book, but as a chess fan I would like to say that you need to have a large sample size before you can pass judgement using statistics. This is how Professor Arpad Elo (inventor of the Gaussian Elo distribution in chess) made chess a highly predictable encounter. With Sabermetrics and the A's, Bluejays, etc, perhaps the same will happen in baseball as in chess. But you need to have a large sample size, and the problem with baseball is physical injuries can make stats obsolete overnight (not as true in mind games, although chess players on occasion do go insane, and age is a factor even in chess). So there is always the element of chance in sport. But professional management is long overdue, considering how much money is spent in this sport.

All in all a good book. I might even read it; also I recommend Michael Lewis' Moneyball.