This item from Stadium Rant reminded me that for some reason, whenever I see an article about the new baseball statistics acronyms, I think of the theme song from the old Mickey Mouse Club (kids, ask your grandparents):
M-I-C (See you real soon)
K-E-Y (Why? Because we like you)
M-O-U-S-E
I’ve tried watching the Statcast version of ESPN’s Sunday night games but the screen just gets too crowded with all that data.
There are great reference books out there on the subject. Some are extremely technical in nature. (I’m a doctor, Jim, not a mathematician!). Perhaps my favorite is Anthony Castrovince’s A Fan’s Guide to Baseball Analytics: Why WAR, WHIP, wOBA, and Other Advanced Sabermetrics Are Essential to Understanding Modern Baseball. Here’ my Bookshelf Conversation with him from 2020.
Here are a couple of others you might want to check out, several of which were published by McFarland:
- Encyclopedia of Baseball Statistics: From A to Zr, by Eric Blabac
- Smart Baseball: The Story Behind the Old Stats That Are Ruining the Game, the New Ones That Are Running It, and the Right Way to Think About Baseball, by Keith Law
- Understanding Sabermetrics: An Introduction to the Science of Baseball Statistics, 2d ed., by
- Reasoning with Sabermetrics: Applying Statistical Science to Baseball’s Tough Questions, also by the three authors above
- Practicing Sabermetrics: Putting the Science of Baseball Statistics to Work, ditto
Then there are those that more narrative and a little less “intense,” for lack of a better word, like The Hidden Game of Baseball: A Revolutionary Approach to Baseball and Its Statistics by John Thorn and Peter Palmer, originally published in 1985 and re-released in 2015.
But the granddaddy of them all is Percentage Baseball by Earnshaw Cook. This was one of the first baseball books I ever bought as a precocious 10-year-old. As good as I was in math when I was a kid, I still don’t understand it all.
is available on Amazon.com,
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