The Numbers Game: Baseball's Lifelong Fascination with Statistics [Hardcover]

Alan Schwarz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 21, 2004

Most baseball fans, players and even team executives assume that the National Pastime's infatuation with statistics is simply a byproduct of the information age, a phenomenon that blossomed only after the arrival of Bill James and computers in the 1980s. They couldn't be more wrong.

In this unprecedented new book, Alan Schwarz - whom bestselling Moneyball author Michael Lewis calls "one of today's best baseball journalists" - provides the first-ever history of baseball statistics, showing how baseball and its numbers have been inseparable ever since the pastime's birth in 1845. He tells the history of this obsession through the lives of the people who felt it most: Henry Chadwick, the 19th-century writer who invented the first box score and harped endlessly about which statistics mattered and which did not; Allan Roth, Branch Rickey's right-hand numbers man with the late-1940s Brooklyn Dodgers; Earnshaw Cook, a scientist and Manhattan Project veteran who retired to pursue inventing the perfect baseball statistic; John Dewan, a former Strat-O-Matic maven who built STATS Inc. into a multimillion-dollar powerhouse for statistics over the Internet; and dozens more.

Almost every baseball fan for 150 years has been drawn to the game by its statistics, whether through newspaper box scores, the backs of Topps baseball cards, The Baseball Encyclopedia, or fantasy leagues. Today's most ardent stat scientists, known as "sabermetricians," spend hundreds of hours coming up with new ways to capture the game in numbers, and engage in holy wars over which statistics are best. Some of these men - and women -- are even being hired by major league teams to bring an understanding of statistics to a sport that for so long shunned it.

Taken together, Schwarz paints a history not just of baseball statistics, but of the soul of the sport itself. The Numbers Game will be an invaluable part of any fan's library and go down as one of the sport's classic books.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Sports journalist Schwarz brings to the fore this intelligent, smartly researched and often hilarious look at the use of statistics in baseball, which Schwarz definitively shows to "date back to the game's earliest days in the 19th century." It will delight any fan who memorizes the numbers on the back of trading cards or pores over newspaper box scores. The book's success is rooted in its focus on the people "obsessed with baseball's statistics ever since the box score started it all in 1845," rather than being about the statistics themselves. The reader is presented with enthusiastic but unvarnished looks at such key figures as Henry Chadwick, whose love for numbers led to his inventing the box score grid that remains, Schwarz shows, "virtually unchanged to this day"; Allan Roth, the numbers man hired by the Brooklyn Dodgers who was as important to the team's success as its famed GM Branch Rickey; and the all-but-forgotten work of George Lindsey, one of the first people to apply statistical analysis to weigh various baseball strategies. Delivered in a delightfully breezy and confident style, this volume also serves as an excellent alternate or parallel history of the sport, as we see how the statistics influenced the game itself—such as the banning of the spitball—as much as they were used to detail individual games.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

"The Numbers Game is a riveting history of the search for new baseball knowledge. The amazing thing about that search, as Schwarz ably demonstrates, is that it was conducted not by baseball insiders, but by the ordinary baseball fan."
- Michael Lewis, author of the best-selling Moneyball

"Alan Schwarz has written one of the most original and engrossing histories of baseball you could ever read."
- From the Foreword by Peter Gammons

"The language of baseball is statistics, and Alan Schwarz gives us an unprecedented look at one of the world's great romance languages. Schwarz deftly illuminates the history and relevance of baseball statistics and is at the top of his game introducing the people behind the numbers. The cast is an eclectic mix of baseball linguists, including an alcoholic pack rat, a military strategist and one of Albert Einstein's faculty colleagues. You don't need a slide rule or pocket protector to appreciate the tales Schwarz has unearthed -- gems such as Babe Ruth's long lost 715th home run abound -- but you will become more fluent in baseball."
- Tom Verducci, Sports Illustrated

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books; First Edition edition (July 21, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312322224
• ISBN-13: 978-0312322229
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,000,176 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

40 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars If you know what the numbers 714, 61*, 1.12 and .366 mean..., August 19, 2004

By 

Douglas B. Rubin (Princeton, NJ United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Numbers Game: Baseball's Lifelong Fascination with Statistics (Hardcover)

I was looking forward to reading this book for a while. Alan Schwarz has become one of my favorite writers (Baseball America, ESPN.com, New York Times, etc.) about baseball during the post-Bill James era because he's not afraid of confronting the science and theories (not necessarily truth) of OBAvg., OPS, DIPS and a host of other relatively-new methods to extract and measure baseball performance. He's obviously a fan of the past and the mystique/history of our national pastime, but he's also intelligent and skeptical of conformist thinking and open to evaluating the next, new thing.

Choosing baseball statistics as a subject - one that's exploded in importance during the last 15 years (with the concurrent increase in players' salaries and availability of cheap computers) -- Schwarz's book tells a surprisingly riveting story.

The hero's aren't John McGraw, Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson or Lou Brock who changed the way baseball is played. Rather, they are the men like Henry Chadwick, Allan Roth, Earl Weaver, and of course, Bill James who've changed the way the way we interpret, measure, and yes appreciate baseball through the myriad of statistics.

If you think the most interesting thing about a baseball card is the picture, this book is not for you. But if you, like many (most?) baseball fans know what the numbers 714, 61*, 1.12 and .366 mean, then you will enjoy this book immensely. If you liked "Moneyball" and want to get the story on how baseball evolved from scorecards and boxscores to MLB.com and on-demand hitters' "spray charts", "The Numbers Game" is essential.

From the first boxscores and play-by-play newspaper accounts (I didn't know they did that!) that allowed a world without radio or television to "experience" baseball, to Branch Rickey's secret weapon as he built the Dodger dynasty of the 1950's, to the new crop of intelligent, numerate GM's, the analysis and appreciation of baseball has changed as much as the game itself has.

Even though I am quite numerate with respect to baseball statistics, I enjoyed the way this book put the history of it all together in a very compelling way.

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Inside the History of Baseball's Number Games...and more, August 17, 2004

By 

Matthew Wall (Monterey, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Numbers Game: Baseball's Lifelong Fascination with Statistics (Hardcover)

I had relatively low expectations for Alan Schwarz' "The Numbers Game" given the unhappy trend in baseball publishing of covering every concievable topic. This trend has resulted in all too many books that cover small topic areas without much in the way of original research, insight, or entertainment value.

I was thus pleasantly surprised when "The Numbers Game" turned out to be a crisply-written book that transcends the apparently dry subject matter of the evolution of baseball statistics. Schwarz has chosen a somewhat episodic approach to his material, focussing as much on specific personalities responsible for the evolution of the use, abuse, understanding, and misunderstanding of statistics in baseball as any particular topic of this number or that. As such, it reads more as a social history of the game through the lens of the numbers as a tome on stats.

There are lots of delicious anecdotes here: the shenanigans of adjusting the Baseball Encylopedia to fit accepted conventional notions of stardom; manipulations of the 1911 batting race records made to deny the hated Ty Cobb a car; the nearly forgotten contributions of the Lindseys of Canada to the scientific study of the game; infighting between the old guard of the Elias bureau and the new Turks, STATS, Inc., and the internecine fighting between amateurs and entrepreneurs that has marked the history of the latter; the great contributions of amateurs and the muted responsiveness of the baseball establishment to the likes of home statheads ranging from Bill James to Voros McCracken.

The coverage of the evolution of baseball thinking since Bill James first appeared on the scene in 1977 is particularly good. Perhaps I'm biased because I know many of the parties mentioned and was a witness second-hand to many of the tiny, perhaps pointless, fights that lace through this period, but Schwarz did a pretty fair job at sorting out the fact from the self-serving fictive.

It's on this point that I think the book truly excels. There's an underlying theme about the nature of evidence and expertise, of the battle between those seeking a detailed truth and those in love with baseball mythology over the less smooth contours of reality, that has some lessons above and beyond the nearly literally-trivial world of baseball statistics.

Schwarz does a wonderful job at describing this process of change, and I highly recommennd this book for baseball fans, and give it a modest recommendation for those less interested in baseball but with an interest in the sociology of the use of evidence.

When one sees a sea-change in baseball's conduct because of the revelations about On-Base Percentage -- basic facts known a century earlier but studiously ignored because they did not serve the short-term interests of the players or owners -- it's hard to say there aren't even more surprises in store for baseball. Reliving this evolution makes for great Hot Stove League reading.

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mandatory reading for all baseball fans, July 17, 2004

By 

Anthony Passaretti (Long Island, NY) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Numbers Game: Baseball's Lifelong Fascination with Statistics (Hardcover)

Did you know that when RBI first appeared in newspapers in 1879, fans were so outraged by this new stat that the Chicago Tribune apologetically eliminated it? Or that range factor--supposedly invented by Bill James in the 1970s--predated fielding percentage by four years? Or that before shaking the sabermetric community with his DIPS theory, Voros McCracken was a punk rocker?

It's not just the history of statistics; it's the story of their inventors. So many of baseball's statisticians have been wonderful characters. Their stories are amazing--one soldier stationed in Norway made extraordinarily in-depth computations by hand from hundreds of box scores tracked and sent to him by his father.

One of the more fascinating aspects of the book for me was how analysts from all generations all too often came to the same conclusions. F.C. Lane developed run values in the 1910s that almost perfectly match Pete Palmer's Linear Weights system. George Lindsay created an expected runs matrix in the 1950s, long before The Hidden Game of Baseball was published. And it seems like every statistician has loathed the sacrifice bunt for over a century.

The discussion of errors in baseball's historical stats was remarkably disturbing. Averages could be off by 100 points, and many efforts to right these mistakes inexplicably met great resistance. You'll shake your head thinking about the all too many people who would rather Ty Cobb's hit total stay locked at the number they know than the truth.

Alan Schwarz writes a riveting history of our favorite sport's numbers. From the numbers themselves--RBI, DIPS, PECOTA, they all get a mention--to the people behind them--Henry Chadwick, Bill James, Voros McCracken, and everyone in between. They're all a part of a till-now unknown story. Schwarz even leaves us salivating at the end with his preview of what Tendu and MLB.com have in store for the future ("That's the slickest f---in' thing I've ever seen in my life.").

Whether you've engaged in heated arguments over an MVP award, debated Linear Weights v. VORP, or simply been engrossed by the back of a baseball card, this book demands a place on your bookshelf.