The Hidden Game of Baseball
by John Thorn, Pete Palmer
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Book Summary Information
Author: John Thorn, Pete PalmerEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1985
ISBN: 0385182848
Number of pages: 420
Publisher: Doubleday
Book Reviews of The Hidden Game of Baseball
Book Review: Great work at the time but since overtaken
Summary: 5 Stars
This book was great for its time, and it's still very interesting and well worth a look. It was probably the first such comprehensive effort to evaluate and rank the players of all time using "sabermetrics," and for some years it remained the main such source and the main reference point for future efforts. I guess the high current prices for the book reflect this.
The methods have basic flaws, which have since been widely pointed out and (I believe) widely acknowledged. For example, the basic unit of measurement is "Linear Weights," in which each accomplishment, whether it be a single, home run, putout, assist, or anything else, is given a "weight," and then they are added together, and the total is normalized. But, as Bill James pointed out with an elegance that's hard to top, the method was doomed to be painfully limited, because "baseball offense isn't linear; it's geometric" -- meaning that the elements of offense combine in a way that goes beyond simply adding them together, plus that each event has an impact on the likelihood of the next event.
But the main flaw is that being "average" is used as the center for everything. Everyone is scored according to how far above or below average he is. The problem is that players who are "average" are assumed to have no value, and are given zero; players who are calculated to be below average are given "negative value." So, if someone has a long and successful career but is found to be below average (example: Bobby Richardson), he winds up with "negative value," which is as though he's worse than nothing, worse than someone who plays just a couple of innings and gets released. Obviously, this is wrong, even if he truly was below average (which Richardson wasn't). An average player isn't a zero -- he has A LOT of value; and even a below-average player can have value. As has been pointed out, pennants are lost every year because of a team's inability to find even just an adequate player for a certain position -- for example, a decent-fielding third baseman who might hit .250 with 10 home runs, or a serviceable #5 starter who can give you some decent innings. This doesn't mean that the ratings are useless. They seem to be fairly good for showing who was better than whom in a given season (although not in the Bobby Richardson example), but not so good for ranking careers. And "zero" or "negative" doesn't really mean what it seems to mean.
The methods that are used for rating defense are EXTREMELY flawed and give some odd results, such as that Roy Smalley was one of the great-fielding shortstops of all time and that Richie Ashburn was better than Willie Mays. But the methods were an important step toward future advances.
Some of the more recent books, such as Bill James' "Historical Abstract" and "Win Shares," are far more state-of-the-art. But this book remains of interest, for its historical significance and for how it helped to frame the subsequent work on the subject. And, not long from now, we'll probably be talking about how outdated those other two books are too.
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