Posted by: Rajan Sambandam in Baseball on
Aug 30, 2008
Why aren't there any more 0.400 hitters in baseball? The eminent evolutionary biologist and baseball fan Stephen Jay Gould answers this great sporting puzzle in his book, Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin, which is only partly about baseball. It is really about understanding basic statistics and along the way you get a great discourse on the animal world and in particular bacteria. He uses these examples, and a terrifying intellect, to argue that just looking at averages (such as the mean) is not sufficient and one has to look at variation within the system as a whole to fully understand trends. With this approach he is also able to answer the question of whether quality of play overall has declined or improved in baseball over time. If you are not into animals, you may want to go straight to the baseball portion, which by itself is not at all a hard read. So why aren't there any more 0.400 hitters in baseball?
Posted by: Rajan Sambandam in Baseball on
Jul 07, 2008
First let's discuss leverage and then get to (the Philadelphia Phillies outfielder) Burrell. Leverage can briefly be described as the ability to exert influence. When a person has the ability to influence another or a situation, then that person is said to have leverage. It is a term often used in financial dealings. Have you seen it applied in sports such as baseball? Here's the set-up. In baseball are all runs equal? In other words, do runs scored in the early innings have the same importance as the runs scored in later innings? Sabermetricians will argue that they are not, simply because runs scored later have lower probabilities of being overtaken. (Click here for an introduction to sabermetrics).
Posted by: Rajan Sambandam in Books, Baseball on
Jun 18, 2008
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis
How did one of the poorest teams in baseball, the Oakland Athletics, win so many games? Fascinated by this question Lewis begins an investigation that takes him into an area of baseball that was shrouded in mystery about a decade ago. This was an area dominated by people who believed that to truly understand baseball you have to use numbers. Not just any number from a box score (such as an RBI) but those that were shown to be related to winning (such as on-base percentage).
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