Amazon.com: The Wages of Wins: Taking Measure of the Many Myths in Modern Sport: David J. Berri, Martin B. Schmidt, Stacey L. Brook: Books

Review
"Wages is provocative, stimulating and challenging."
--Dick Friedman -- Sports Illustrated

"In The Wages of Wins, the authors attempt to puncture some popular myths--saying that payroll and wins are not highly correlated, and that in baseball, football....attendance hasn't been significantly affected by players strikes or owner lockouts."
--Sue Kirchhoff -- USA Today

"In The Wages of Wins, the economists David J. Berri, Martin B. Schmidt, and Stacey L. Brook set out to solve the Iverson problem. Weighing the relative value of fouls, rebounds, shots taken, turnovers, and the like, they've created an algorithm that, they argue, comes closer than any previous statistical measure to capturing the true value of a basketball player....Looking at the findings that Berri, Schmidt, and Brook present is enough to make one wonder what exactly basketball experts--coaches, managers, sportswriters--know about basketball."
--Malcolm Gladwell -- The New Yorker

"When I read the book, I was impressed by the amount of effort that went into compiling the reams of data that underlie the work...The fundamental case the authors make is that the statistical analysis shows that the conventional wisdom about sports is dead wrong--that the data as the put it, "offers many surprises."
--Joe Nocera -- The New York Times

Review

“When I read the book, I was impressed by the amount of effort that went into compiling the reams of data that underlie the work…The fundamental case the authors make is that the statistical analysis shows that the conventional wisdom about sports is dead wrong—that the data as the put it, “offers many surprises.”—Joe Nocera, The New York Times
“In The Wages of Wins, the authors attempt to puncture some popular myths—saying that payroll and wins are not highly correlated, and that in baseball, football….attendance hasn’t been significantly affected by players strikes or owner lockouts.”—Sue Kirchhoff, USA Today

“In The Wages of Wins, the economists David J. Berri, Martin B. Schmidt, and Stacey L. Brook set out to solve the Iverson problem. Weighing the relative value of fouls, rebounds, shots taken, turnovers, and the like, they’ve created an algorithm that, they argue, comes closer than any previous statistical measure to capturing the true value of a basketball player. …Looking at the findings that Berri, Schmidt, and Brook present is enough to make one wonder what exactly basketball experts—coaches, managers, sportswriters—know about basketball.”—Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker

"Wages is provocative, stimulating and challenging."—Dick Friedman, Sports Illustrated
"It is one thing when an obnoxious fan or sports talk show blowhard spouts off about who is the best player or why a certain team doesn't win games. It is quite another thing when three economics professors, which the authors of this book are, who love sports give you proof to back up their arguments. Not many casual basketball fans would agree that Allen Iverson isn't a very productive player, but the authors have the data to show otherwise. It is hard to argue when the cold hard facts are in front of your face... The Wages of Wins is a very important book in the field of sports economics and a very enjoyable and thought provoking read. It leaves you wanting a sequel to it (which, luckily, the writers hint at)."—CollegeHoops.net

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Product Details

Hardcover: 304 pages
Publisher: Stanford Business Books; 1 edition (May 9, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0804752877
ISBN-13: 978-0804752879
Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.3 x 0.8 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (13 customer reviews)

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #599,299 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)
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Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Surprise Me!

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First Sentence:
Sports are entertainment. Read the first page

Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
New York, Win Score, World Series, Michael Jordan, Shaquille O'Neal, Kevin Garnett, Allen Iverson, Tim Duncan, Chicago Bulls, Kobe Bryant, National League, Brett Favre, Ben Wallace, Super Bowl, Peyton Manning, Carmelo Anthony, Coase Theorem, Detroit Pistons, Karl Malone, Los Angeles Lakers, David Robinson, Dennis Rodman, Jason Kidd, North American, Ron Harper

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Citations (learn more)

This book cites 46 books:

Pro Football Guide by Sporting News in Back Matter (1), Back Matter (2), and Back Matter (3)
Sports Economics by Rodney D. Fort in Back Matter (1), Back Matter (2), and Back Matter (3)
Jason Kidd (Basketball Legends) by Brant James on page 126, page 201, and page 202
History of Economic Thought by Harry Landreth in Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
Economics of Sports, The (2nd Edition) (The Addison-Wesley Series in Economics) by Michael A. Leeds on page 80, and Back Matter

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Pro Football Prospectus by Sean Lahman

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Customer Reviews

13 Reviews

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4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
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3.3 out of 5 stars (13 customer reviews)

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71 of 78 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Bad math smugly explained, July 28, 2006

By	D. Blum "eclectic reader" (boston) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I really looked forward to this book after reading the review in The New Yorker. The reviewer's critical skills, evidently, do not extend to evaluating the merits of a logical argument.

There are so many logical problems with the analysis in this book, it is difficult to know where to begin.

I will limit myself to just a handful, among countless possibilities.

1) The authors find a correlation between the stability of a basketball team's roster and its winning percentage, and conclude that roster stability is a factor in producing wins! Classic problem of mistaking effect for cause. Clearly, winning teams are disinclined to make major roster changes, and losing teams are eager to. I was so amazed at this I reread it to see if I missed where they pointed this out. They didn't.

2) The authors show a correlation between more assists and winning percentage and conclude that assists help produce wins. Again, very silly. A team with a higher shooting percentage and fewer turnovers will of course get more wins and produce more assists. But the assists are not producing the wins - the shooting percentage is. Were these factors discounted? Not according to the text.

3) Most problematic, the authors define a way of measuring the value of players to a team, and then "prove" their method by summing these values, per player, across each team, and show that they do indeed predict the number of wins each team will get. What they fail to realize is that their method of apportioning value to a player necessarily sums back to team totals such as points per possession that we know correlate to wins per team. But this in no way proves that the apportioning is wrong. We could just as easily base each player's value "team's points while players is on the floor - opposing team's points while player is in the floor". Sum for all players on team, and you will find the team's points-per-game and the opposition's points per game, and you have just "proven" that your method of measuring a player's value is accurate.

4. In looking at rebounds, there is not even the slightest caveat that a player's rebounds per game are affected by who he shares rebounding responsibilities with. If you are in the front court with Shaq, you will get fewer rebounds, not because the other team gets them, but because your teammate does, so comparing rebounding stats between players across teams is highly questionable.

5. Ridiculously, they conclude that adding great players to your roster makes the other players worse not better (this is written as a great revelation, demythifying the common presumption that great players make teammates better). Adding great players indeed will make other players statistically less productive. They will take fewer shots, get fewer rebounds, fewer assists if a new ball-handler is added, etc. And so, according their evaluation method, the other players become worse. This should clearly tell them there is something wrong with their system, based so heavily on specific metrics of productivity. Instead, they simply accept the merit of their method as fact, and conclude that adding great players really makes other players worse!!!

The most frustrating thing about this book, however, for an analytically minded reader, is its smugness. They understand statistics. They have the answers. They are bringing them down from the mountains and explaining them to us idiot peons. All while their reasoning is so problematic.

I in no way am a supporter of the intuitive and nonsensical drivel one hears from so many sports coaches, players and commentators. I would have enjoyed a good, statistical, analytical study of the game of basketball. Unfortunately, this is not it.

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12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing, August 14, 2006

By	Estimated Prophet (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews

I had high hopes for this book but my expectations were not met. The authors are clearly eager to bear the Freakonomics mantle (they say as much in several places), but unfortunately they do not exhibit anything resembling the flair of Levitt and Dubner. Their cute comparison of quarterbacks and mutual funds just sounds like a cheap imitation of the comparison between teachers and sumo wrestlers (which, honestly, wasn't all that clever anyway). Much of the other writing also seems to imitate the conversational style of Bill James, but without as much wit. Overall the writing comes off as alternately condescending and self-congratulatory, and sometimes both.

Style aside, the book contains a number of substantive weaknesses. For example, the chapter on the effects of labor shortages on fan attendance shows clear signs of bias. The authors favorably cite plenty of evidence that supports their hypothesis; and when confronted with evidence to the contrary, they suddenly decide to pick it apart and explain it away. Sorry guys, it doesn't work that way. This clear example of "disconfirmation bias" causes the chapter to lose all credibility. It wouldn't hold up in a peer-reviwed journal.

Further, although the authors claim to be "taking measure of the many myths in modern sport" (the subtitle of the book), they actually devote a lot of effort to knocking down strawmen. Is there anyone alive who really thinks that "the best players in basketball score the most" or that "quarterbacks should be credited with wins and losses"? No one with more than a passing knowledge of sports actually believe these things, but the authors act awfully smug after debunking these nonexistent "myths." Yes, we're all aware that offense is at most half of football, and that the passing attack is only about half of that. Luckily no one attributes wins to quarterbacks, except maybe to point out that a team can win with a mediocre QB (e.g., pointing out Trent Dilfer's career winning percentage) -- which is a different issue altogether.

The book also spends a lot of time trying to analyze basketball using methods that are much better suited to baseball. Don't get me wrong, I admire their effort to subject basketball to some analytical rigor. But baseball is largely an amalgam of statistics and can be studied as such. Basketball simply cannot. There are too many events in basketball that clearly affect the game but are not quantified (a pick, a shot that is altered but not blocked, a team deciding not to drive against a particular player, a player drawing a double team and getting a teammate open, the second-to-last pass of a possession). One might conclude, based on the demonstrated strong correlation between wins and the conventional statistics employed in this book, that these events are all relatively unimportant. But this argument ultimately fails because the purpose of the analysis is to measure the contributions of individual players. A team might score two points but the model does not adequately break down individual contributions beyond who scores the points and, if applicable, who gets the assist. Similarly, most of what happens on defense isn't recorded, and the model only takes into account steals and blocked shots. The authors sweep these weaknesses under the rug and proceed to devote dozens of pages to comparing players based on their new, supposedly superior, measures of individual performance. This is an enormous flaw.

Further, I was also struck how a team of economists could write about the value of basketball players without paying attention to the supply curve. They do adjust some of their stats for league-average at the position, but not on a category-by-category basis. In the final chapter, where they purport to show that scorers are paid too much, they fail to examine the issue of scarcity. My wild guess is that the data would support their conclusion, but I was struck by the absence of real analysis here.

Of course, no book on sports statistics and/or economics is complete without the obligatory nod to the genius of Billy Beane and the claim that salary disparities do not lead to competitive imbalance. This version of the story is no more convincing than any of the others. They happily point to the 2003 Marlins as an example of a low-payroll team winning against the odds, but somehow ignore the fact that a number of those players (Derrek Lee, A.J. Burnett, Josh Beckett, Ivan Rodriguez, Alex Gonzalez, Mike Lowell) are now earning big salaries in big markets while the Marlins are under .500. Sure, a team can win with young players who haven't yet become eligible for free agency or arbitration, but is that any way to build a franchise for long-term success? Where is the analysis of that rather obvious question? And where is the point, made quite clear in Moneyball, that no inefficient market can last forever? What happens when the next Billy Beane is hired to run the Yankees?

I will grant that the book is thought-provoking. But ultimately there are many other books on sports statistics and economics that are much more readable and well-argued than this.

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10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lucid writing, entertaining argument and a passionate subject. This is like a fresh breeze., May 29, 2006

By	D. Stuart "Researcher at Kudos" (Auckland NZ) - See all my reviews

Berry and his co-authors take a really fresh approach here to the world of sport, and look at the big dollars that get spent - or mispent - by teams that want to win at all costs. The mistake that team owners are making, according to the authors, is that they are looking at the wrong statistics of success. When you buy a player, what are the vital stats that really matter?

The book is at once disheartening (money buys one hell of a lot of the points we see on the various league tables) but then also entirely heartening: individual sportspeople, and b-teams still rock the game and lift their performance way above the odds.

The difference is that many managers and coaches (and us fans for that matter focus on the wrong numbers. We count the goals that a player scores, but discount the fumbles, the turnovers and the other dynamics of team play. A star goal shooter may actually be bad for the team's chance of winning.

Sports these days is dominated by statistics. You listen to a commentary and you hear the win/lose ratios, the all-time earnings figures, the goals, the assists and what have you. Well here the authors put another set of very relevant numbers on the table - and show how they reached these conclusions. Their arguments are pretty convincing and as a result I think we'll be talking about this book for some time to come - and pondering the nature of sports today and whether Player X really is greater than Player Y. What a fresh piece of writing! Buy it - I'm sure you'll enjoy it as much as I did.

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