Baseball Between the Numbers: Why Everything You Know About the Game Is Wrong,   ISBN:9780465005475

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great book. interesting stuff. if you're a fan of baseball you should read this book. you'll learn a lot from it.

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Whether Fantasy or reality, a real fan of the game will find much to love in this book. Statistics galore and a point of view that you may not have considered. Good stuff!

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How can some teams spend a ton of money for a cellar-dwelling result? How do other teams build a thrifty team and manage to thrive?

Some of these answers appear in Baseball Between the Numbers, which contains a compilation of studies regarding different game facets. There are chapters devoted to relief pitchers ("Are Teams Letting Their Closers Go to Waste?"), managers ("Is Joe Torre a Hall of Fame Manager?"), situational hitting ("When Is One Run Worth More Than Two?"), high school draft picks ("What Happened to Todd Van Poppel?") and many more.

As a lifelong baseball enthusiast, I thought the book was a great look at some of the more intriguing items that happen inside and outside a game. The novel is chocked with stats, so if you are into that sort of thing, you'll get the maximum out of it. However, you don't need to be a math genius to enjoy the book ... you need to be only a baseball fan.

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This important effort examines key questions about baseball strategy, player value, and finances. The authors are from Baseball Prospectus, and they devote a chapter each to 27 important questions. The authors examine whether teams should use a four-man or five-man rotation (they favor four, limiting pitch counts), why closers should be more effectively used in key middle innings (quite persuasive), and why RBI's are over-rated - which explains why Juan Gonzalez was twice named MVP over a far superior Alex Rodriguez. The authors also examine and largely debunk owner-promoted myths about ticket price increases being tied to player salaries, and publicly-financed ballparks improving city economies - what they improve is owner profits. All together, these 27 chapters are well-researched and thought-provoking, although not entirely flawless. The writing gets a bit stiff in places, the charts need full headings rather than abbreviations, and the comparison of Barry Bonds to Babe Ruth forgets that Bonds wasn't close until he began cheating with steroids. Still, this is solid reading for students of baseball and other thinking fans.

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Excellent stuff to really make you think about baseball and commonly held misconceptions.

I'm not a math/stat guy and this made my hair hurt it was so complicated.