Blog Entries tagged 'Baseball'

Win Shares, Part II - How Players Line Up

rsambandam@trchome.com — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 01:00:00 +0100

In Part I of this post the ides of Win Shares was introduced as the creation of the sabermetrician Bill James. It is a single number that encompasses the complete contribution of a baseball player during a season and hence allows measurement and comparison of player values over time. In this part we will look at specific Win Share numbers and players who excelled over time.

Who is the career leader in Win Shares? Babe Ruth, of course, with 756. How good was he? For 20 of the 22 se [...]

Win Shares, Part I - One Number To Compare Baseball Players

rsambandam@trchome.com — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 01:00:00 +0100

Baseball fans love to argue. That much we can say with certainty. Where uncertainty begins is in the facts brought forward to support the arguments. Baseball is awash with statistics but a common mistake (the availability error) is to use the easy ones to make one's argument regardless of its relevance. Situationally, a fan can use batting average, home runs, RBI, ERA, saves or other easily available statistics to bolster his case. Alternately, more subjective criteria such as fielding ab [...]

Death of the 0.400 Hitter

rsambandam@trchome.com — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 01:00:00 +0100

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 [...]

Does Pat Burrell Have Leverage?

rsambandam@trchome.com — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 01:00:00 +0100

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 [...]

Books: Moneyball

rsambandam@trchome.com — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 01:00:00 +0100

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 show [...]