After the “Ball” is over…

Just received a copy of Homegrown: How the Red Sox Built a Champion From the Ground Up, by Boston Globe journalist Alex Spier and it got me to thinking:

How many of these microcosms of team-building have come down the pike since Michael Lewis first published Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game all the way back in 2003? Go ahead, take a guess. With apologies to the good folks at Goodreads, I strongly disagree with their list of “Books Similar to Moneyball.” To my mind, the only thing they all have in common is that they’re about baseball.

I make no claim that this is a complete list, so please feel free to comment on what I missed. That said, according to my calculations — and in no particular order — we have:

Power Ball: Anatomy of a Modern Baseball Game, by Rob Neyer
Astroball: The New Way to Win It All, by Ben Reiter
The Extra 2%: How Wall Street Strategies Took a Major League Baseball Team from Worst to First, by Jonah Keri
The Cardinals Way: How One Team Embraced Tradition and Moneyball at the Same Time, by Howard Megdal
The Cubs Way: The Zen of Building the Best Team in Baseball and Breaking the Curse, by Tom Verduci
Big Data Baseball: Math, Miracles, and the End of a 20-Year Losing Streak, by Travis Sawchik
Chumps to Champs: How the Worst Teams in Yankees History Led to the ’90s Dynasty, by Bill Pennington
Inside the Empire: The True Power Behind the New York Yankees, by Bob Klapisch and Paul Solotaroff
Homegrown: How the Red Sox Built a Champion from the Ground Up, by Alex Speier

Seems like you don’t even have to win a World Championship to merit a book; all you have to do is compete for a playoff spot, as did the Pirates (Big Data Baseball). In fact, I find it odd that the team’s name doesn’t even appear in the title. Same for the Tampa Bay Rays (The Extra 2%). I guess they’re not “marquee” enough.

Then there are the books that primarily deal with the new generation of analytics that go into front office thinking. As you know, I’m no math genius, so my eyes glaze over when I look at the various formulas. Among this sub-genre are:

The MVP Machine: How Baseball’s New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players, by
When Big Data Was Small: My Life in Baseball Analytics and Drug Design, by Richard D. Kramer
The Shift: The Next Evolution in Baseball Thinking by Russell A. Carleton
Encyclopedia of Baseball Statistics: From A to Zr, by Eric Blabac

Finally, we have the precursors to even this sub-genre, as exemplified by

The Hidden Game of Baseball: A Revolutionary Approach to Baseball and Its Statistics, by John Thorn and Pete Palmer
The Numbers Game, by Alan Schwarz

The Thorn/Palmer collaboration was first published in 1984 and was ahead of its time. Schwarz’s contribution is more of a history of baseball stats rather than a proponent of the new metrics. Some are relatively easy, like OPS. Others make my head spin, like this one for “weight on-base average (wOBA)”

When computing wOBA, we use Plate Appearances = AB + BB - IBB + HBP + SF and we also exclude IBBs from the count of BBs. Our view (and those of the creators of these stats) is that SHs and IBBs are managerial decisions, and in general the best way to handle these is to exclude them from the rate stat (wOBA); then when computing the counting stat (wRAA), we assume the hitter would have done as well as they normally did in the situation if asked to hit.

So for example, in 2010 we get a formula for MLB of: wOBA = (0.70 * uBB + 0.73 * HBP + 0.89 * 1B + 1.27 * 2B + 1.61 * 3B + 2.07 * HR + 0.25 * SB - 0.50 * CS) / (AB+BB-IBB+HBP+SF)

Why 0.73 or 0.89?? Ugh. There’s a line in the classic Abbot and Costello skit “Who’s on First,” in which Abbot tells his confused friend that he’s getting the lineup. “I don’t even know what I’m talking about!” counters Costello. That’s pretty much how I feel, so I’m going to stop now before I embarrass myself any further.

So I’ll end with this: Now that every team as some department that covers this sort of Moneyball territory and it’s no longer that revolutionary, what will the next “big thing” be in baseball books?

By the way, if you’re interested…