“Before Bill James, before Moneyball, all the way back in 1964, we published one of the touchstones of mathematical analysis of the sport: Percentage Baseball by Earnshaw Cook. As a result of a conversation about the productive value of the sacrifice bunt, Cook … began putting probabilistic values on every aspect of the game in an effort to make every decision a matter of applying cut-and-dried rules.”
From the MIT Press blog, April 4, 2007
Percentage Baseball was one of the first baseball books I 
remember buying as a kid. Found it at a used book store for a couple of bucks. Even though I didn’t undestand the material at the time (and still, don’t in some examples), its charts and graphs made me seem precocious just by lugging it around. I still have it in my library, it’s original bright green cover making it easily recognizeable among all the other volumes. (The book art here is the latest rendition.)
That it’s still available today is quite remarkable. It is the granddaddy of the SABR movement.
is available on Amazon.com,
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