Is sabermetrics really that much of an improvement?

April 5, 2016

http://www.insightsquared.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/9780393338393_custom-155b6750c08f9ced4913d696ca6cf11650974b21-s6-c30.jpgThe new normal in baseball literature is to publish something — anything — that pushes baseball analytics as the only logical way to assemble a team. Michael Lewis’ Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game may may have been the first “official” book to address the concept, but there have been several since its 2003 publication that apply that philosophy to other teams, including

Now we have books that purport that a version of Moneyball has been around a looong time, including Murray Klein’s brand new Stealing Games: How John McGraw Transformed Baseball with the 1911 New York Giants. This has become a whole cottage industry as writers seek to retrospectively glom on to the topic’s popularity.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/8f/78/87/8f7887c552dc3bf260b5b5a5983bf793.jpgAnd let’s not forget such seminal contributions as The Hidden Game of Baseball: A Revolutionary Approach to Baseball and Its Statistics, by John Thorn and Pete Palmer, originally released some 30 years ago; The Numbers Game: Baseball’s Lifelong Fascination with Statistics, by Alan Schwarz; and perhaps the granddaddy of them all, Percentage Baseball, published by Earnshaw Cook in 1964. (Of course there have been others, but time and laziness do not permit further investigation right now.)

But is all this math really any more reliable? Not according to that famous iconoclast former NY Times baseball writer and Hall of Fame Spink Awardee Murray Chass. The man deemed a “dinosaur” by many contemporary (read, younger) sportswriters, Chass recently published “PERCOTA Performs Poorly” on his website in which he points out, among other things, “For the 2015 season, PECOTA projected correctly the final place standing of eight National League teams but missed on all 15 American League teams. In terms of number of wins for each team, PECOTA was off by an average of 8.7 wins per team.” (I haven’t read BP in a while,so I’m going to take his word that his math is correct).

These books represent another cottage industry and I’ve always wondered who the main audience is? (Encyclopedia of Baseball Statistics: From A to Zr immediately comes to mind.) Can fanciers of fantasy baseball really be that hard core that they refer to these in planning their teams?

 

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Tagged as: Alan Schwarz, baseball analytics, Howard Megdal, John Thorn, Jonah Keri, Moneyball, Murray Chass, Pete Palmer

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