The next quantum leap beyond Moneyball , this book offers powerful new insights into all human decision-making, because if sports teams are getting it wrong this badly, how do you know you're not? Sometimes the decisions that teams make are simply inexplicable. Consider: sports teams have an immense amount of detailed, quantifiable information to draw upon, more than in virtually any other industry. They have powerful incentives for making good decisions. Everyone sees the results of their choices, and the consequences for failure are severe. And yet... they keep making the same mistakes over and over again... systematic mistakes you'd think they'd learn how to avoid. Now, two leading sports economists reveal those mistakes in basketball, baseball, football, and hockey, and explain why sports decision-makers never seem to learn their lessons. You'll learn which statistics are connected to wins, and which aren't, and which statistics can and can't predict the future. Along the way, David Berri and Martin Schmidt show why a quarterback's place in the draft tells you nothing about how he'll perform in the NFL... why basketball decision-makers don't focus on the factors that really correlate with NBA success... why famous coaches don't deliver better results... and much more.
Stumbling on Wins (Bonus Content Edition)
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Review
As seen on The New York Times' Freakonomics blog, ESPN.com's True Hoop, and Slate.com.
"In Stumbling on Wins, sports economists Berri (Southern Utah Univ.) and Schmidt (College of William and Mary) follow up their The Wages of Wins (with Stacey Brook, CH, Jan'07, 44-2764) with more modeling and number-crunching applications. The holy grail remains the same: understanding and improving decision making on the court, field, and ice and in the front offices of North American professional team sports. Summing Up: Recommended. Sports and sports economics collections at all levels. Reprinted with permission from CHOICE, copyright by the American Library Association.
About the Author
David J. Berri is associate professor of economics at Southern Utah University. He has written extensively on sports economics for academic journals, newspapers, and magazines, including The New York Times.
Martin B. Schmidt, professor of economics at the College of William and Mary, specializes in sports economics and macroeconomics. His writing has appeared in the field’s leading academic and general interest journals, including The New York Times.
Berri and Schmidt coauthored The Wages of Wins and maintain a popular blog, The Wages of Wins Journal, which discusses the economics of sports decision-making (dberri.wordpress.com).
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
21 of 24 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointing: nothing new, a limited unvariate analysis of a multivariate dynamic system
June 2, 2010
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review
(What's this?)
This is disappointing and I don't recommend it, either for sports fans or anyone with an interest in the growing and substantial research on fallibilities in human judgment, decision making and use of information. Its basic point is one that is well established, that conventional measures of performance in professional sports are misleading predictors of future performance; examples are pitchers' ERAs and NBA points per game. It repeats the many-times made observations about how often NFL first round quarterback draft picks are bombs. That's well presented and thoroughly documented but in more detail than the use of the findings warrants. Its main point is that overreliance on the wrong data leads to bad economic decisions by managers who should know better. I don't recall any item in the analysis that has not been covered elsewhere. Examples here are: (1) Field managers and coaches in baseball, football and basketball have little impact on team performance, (2) Statistically, it makes sense to go for it on fourth down, (3) Trading up to get a high draft pick is generally a bad deal, economically and in terms of finding the best talent, (4) NBA draft position is a poor predictor of career performance, (5) The NBA "hot hands" streaks are a myth and (6) Isiah Thomas was a truly, truly lousy general manager of the Knicks. Agreed. Agreed.
The main weakness of the book seems to me that it largely relies on data about individual performance for its core evidence and though it alludes to the context of teams, it is very univariate in its analysis. The authors emphasize this but only in a single footnote. (The regression-based methodology examines only the strength of the linear relationship between two independent variables.) There is no multivariate perspective: the balance of a team's roles within a deliberate defense-offense strategy, career injuries, character burnouts and dysfunctions, owners, franchise history and the many contextual economic factors such as player caps and guaranteed contracts. It's almost all about individual stars only. The selected examples seem casual and arbitrary. In a book that argues that the role of the coach is minimal, for instance, there is no mention of, among others, Bill Belichick, Bill Walsh and Scotty Bowman, as counterexamples or confirmatory ones to be explained through the same methodology of data analysis. None of these are even mentioned once and Isiah Thomas and Alan Inverson are given far too many pages. There is no consideration of what I suspect explains the dynamics of performance, which is the nature of sports teams as a social organization comparable to that of most Fortune 1000 firms and very much driven by short-term career, management and market pressures. Given that the univariate analysis shows that no figure explains more than a fraction of the variance in the linear regression analysis, then there simply must be a multivariate methodology for any conclusions to be drawn about the nature of the decision making process.
Perhaps I am incorrect in my assessment here; I have only limited skills in statistical analysis. The authors have strong resumes and the book thoroughly documents its sources and provides excellent footnotes. It's well presented. But all in all, it seems far too casual in its framing of a complex issue, doesn't add new insights and is overloaded with micro-level data that belabors the case that decision making in pro sports is largely screwed up.
The main weakness of the book seems to me that it largely relies on data about individual performance for its core evidence and though it alludes to the context of teams, it is very univariate in its analysis. The authors emphasize this but only in a single footnote. (The regression-based methodology examines only the strength of the linear relationship between two independent variables.) There is no multivariate perspective: the balance of a team's roles within a deliberate defense-offense strategy, career injuries, character burnouts and dysfunctions, owners, franchise history and the many contextual economic factors such as player caps and guaranteed contracts. It's almost all about individual stars only. The selected examples seem casual and arbitrary. In a book that argues that the role of the coach is minimal, for instance, there is no mention of, among others, Bill Belichick, Bill Walsh and Scotty Bowman, as counterexamples or confirmatory ones to be explained through the same methodology of data analysis. None of these are even mentioned once and Isiah Thomas and Alan Inverson are given far too many pages. There is no consideration of what I suspect explains the dynamics of performance, which is the nature of sports teams as a social organization comparable to that of most Fortune 1000 firms and very much driven by short-term career, management and market pressures. Given that the univariate analysis shows that no figure explains more than a fraction of the variance in the linear regression analysis, then there simply must be a multivariate methodology for any conclusions to be drawn about the nature of the decision making process.
Perhaps I am incorrect in my assessment here; I have only limited skills in statistical analysis. The authors have strong resumes and the book thoroughly documents its sources and provides excellent footnotes. It's well presented. But all in all, it seems far too casual in its framing of a complex issue, doesn't add new insights and is overloaded with micro-level data that belabors the case that decision making in pro sports is largely screwed up.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
Interesting in parts, but this is obviously a blog converted into a book, rather than content so substantive that it was suited to a book. Most of the inefficiencies discussed are relatively common knowledge by now among statistics-savvy fans, although I did think the analysis on how kickers' value comes more from their kickoffs than field goals was interesting and new.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review
(What's this?)
"Stumbling On Wins" is a very entertaining book - it essentially takes a statistical, economic approach to sports in an attempt to answer common barroom debates such as which coaches are the best and do things like streaks and hot hands really exist.
This approach to sports isn't new - baseball has been stat-crazy for years, and "Moneyball" took it to the next level by providing (sometimes surprising) statistical value to various aspects of the sport. "Stumbling On Wins" expands the formula to other sports, such as pro basketball and football to answer questions about the real value of coaches and players.
The book is filled with nuggets of interesting data that have the potential to change how you look at sports. For example, in professional football, kickers really do matter (not terribly surprising) but what is surprising is that their skill on kickoffs is actually more valuable to a team then their field goal accuracy. Sound crazy? Well, there's stats to back it up.
Other areas of interest in the book cover things like the relative value of various pro athletes (underpaid and overpaid) which are always fun to debate, and especially for basketball fans, a baseball-level-geekery of analysis which is eye-opening to say the least (hint: rebounds are more important then you think.)
I would recommend this book to anyone with an interest in pro sports, from the casual fan to the fanatic. It is an enjoyable, fairly quick read and like the best books, it challenges how you think.
This approach to sports isn't new - baseball has been stat-crazy for years, and "Moneyball" took it to the next level by providing (sometimes surprising) statistical value to various aspects of the sport. "Stumbling On Wins" expands the formula to other sports, such as pro basketball and football to answer questions about the real value of coaches and players.
The book is filled with nuggets of interesting data that have the potential to change how you look at sports. For example, in professional football, kickers really do matter (not terribly surprising) but what is surprising is that their skill on kickoffs is actually more valuable to a team then their field goal accuracy. Sound crazy? Well, there's stats to back it up.
Other areas of interest in the book cover things like the relative value of various pro athletes (underpaid and overpaid) which are always fun to debate, and especially for basketball fans, a baseball-level-geekery of analysis which is eye-opening to say the least (hint: rebounds are more important then you think.)
I would recommend this book to anyone with an interest in pro sports, from the casual fan to the fanatic. It is an enjoyable, fairly quick read and like the best books, it challenges how you think.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
3.0 out of 5 stars
Many interesting conclusions, but lack depths.
The book presents various statistical analyses that were done on the professional football, baseball and basketball. Read more
Published 4 months ago by Inon Zukerman
4.0 out of 5 stars
Short but sweet take on sports statistical theory
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Published on December 19, 2010 by Christopher J. Martin
3.0 out of 5 stars
Something to think about
Stumbling On Wins takes the subject of the misunderstanding of sports team management regarding what really determines performance (Moneyball, etc. Read more
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5.0 out of 5 stars
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I live in a small town with an all-sports radio station. The lead voice and "expert" on that station is a nice enough fellow; he smiles a lot and does local charity work. Read more
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Chiefly for Basketball Fans
Sports has always had its stats geeks, but rarely have economists examined professional athletics with their trained eyes, much less did so in so readable a fashion. Read more
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Freaknomics meets Moneyball
Sports economics sounds like a difficult and dry subject. It's not, at least not as this easy-to-read, absorbing book explains it. Read more
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Stupid Regression Tricks
A book like this can do three good things. It can be fun to read, well-written and amusing. It can show deep love and understanding of a sport, giving insights to participants and... Read more
Published on August 1, 2010 by Aaron C. Brown
4.0 out of 5 stars
What it takes to win
Just how good are athletes, coaches or teams? Do make that determination, we typically rely on statistics. Similarly, the folks who run teams often rely on stats. Read more
Published on August 1, 2010 by mrliteral
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