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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
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.
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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
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.
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17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Mandatory reading for all baseball fans, July 17, 2004
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.
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