The Bookshelf Conversations: Anthony Castrovince

I don’t know when it happened. I used to be so good in math. I was even a tutor for a while. But somewhere along the way, I lost all my ability.

I learned to type as a young boy, copy the backs of baseball cards onto scrap paper on a manual typewriter. Those statistics were pretty simple; “counting numbers,” as many of them are called these days. That is, nothing that requires figuring out averages.

Tried to make myself at least appear smart by reading books about baseball stats, including The Hidden Game of Baseball: A Revolutionary Approach to Baseball and Its Statistics by John Thorn and Pete Palmer and The Numbers Game: Baseball’s Lifelong Fascination with Statistics, by Alan Schwarz. (Returning to childhood for a moment, one of the first baseball books I ever bought was Percentage baseball, by Earnshaw Cook. Cost $1.35 at a used book store in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. I see that’s selling for over $900 on Amazon. Maybe it’s time to part with it since I still don’t understand it.)

Thanks to people like Bill James and Tom Tango and sites like Baseball Prospectus, FanGraphs, and Baseball-Reference, there has been an explosion over the past several years of “new age” stats, the latest being “exit velocity,” “launch angle,” and “spin rate.” Interesting, but do I really need them to enhance my enjoyment of the game? I think that’s where a number of fans diverge from the rest of the pack. Just gimme a beer, a nice summer day, turn down the blaring music on the PA, and let me enjoy the game.

But wait…

Once in a while a book comes along that makes me reconsider. The latest among these is A Fan’s Guide to Baseball Analytics: Why WAR, WHIP, wOBA, and Other Advanced Sabermetrics Are Essential to Understanding Modern Baseball, by Anthony Castrovince, a veteran reporter and columnist for MLB.com. It might not be a brand new topic but a lot of these things go into great, eye-rolling, mind-numbing number crunching that make me feel dumber than I normally do.

Castrovince’s book, on the other hand, is easy to understand and doesn’t take itself too seriously. It was enlightening and entertaining to have a Bookshelf Conversation with him, as I hope you will agree from the latest installment.