I used to be so good in math. I don’t know what happened. Oh, sure, I can figure out most of the standard baseball stats, although I’ve always arched my eyebrows at the formulas offered in such books as Encyclopedia of Baseball Statistics: From A to Zr or Beyond Batting Average. One of the first books of this kind was The Hidden Game of Baseball: A Revolutionary Approach to Baseball and Its Statistics by John Thorn and Pete Palmer, first published in 1984 and re-released in 2015.
Batting Runs = 0.47 x 1B + 0.77 X 2B +1.04 x 3B + 1.40 XHR…
I mean where do they come up with this stuff? Why 0.47 instead of, say, 0.49?
And not for nothing, with new analytics coming out seemingly every year, are those “old” numbers even still valid?
This is all by way of introducing yet another attempt to understand this discipline.
I recently discovered The Baseball Mysteries: Challenging Puzzles for Logical Detectives by Jerry Butters and Jim Henle and figured to give it a try via its a sample on Amazon (the price for the hardcover edition at nearly $100, which is a stat that astounds me. The paperback version is a much more reasonable $30). As simple as they try to break it down, on first reading it still escapes me. Guess my brain is just on the wrong side.
Here’s another sample of “Baseball Retrograde Analysis” by Henle from the Winter 2018 edition of The Mathematical Intelligencer. Enjoy.
(There are a number of books which deal with the overall scope of those new analytics and their impact on how we digest the game, but they don’t delve into the actual math so I have omitted them.)
is available on Amazon.com,
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