Wednesday Blog Watch: Take me out to the Binomial Distribution

If you have even a passing interest in sports – American sports, anyway – you will likely have noticed that, after a long, hard winter, baseball season is upon us once again. It will probably surprise no one that we have a number of Red Sox fans here at the MIT Press, though no official rooting policy is suggested or enforced. (And yes, we do have at least one Yankees fan on staff, and conversations usually remain civil…)

As any good fan knows, the big trend in baseball over the past few years is Sabermetrics, the analysis of baseball using the tools of statistics. Or, as one of the movement’s heavy hitters, Bill James, puts it, “the search for objective knowledge about baseball.” (James is now a Red Sox advisor.)

That’s where the Press comes in. Before Bill James, before Moneyball, all the way back in 1964, we published one of the touchstones of mathematical analysis of the sport: Percentage Baseball by Earnshaw Cook. As a result of a conversation about the productive value of the sacrifice bunt, Cook, a metallurgist, began putting probabilistic values on every aspect of the game in an effort to make every decision a matter of applying cut-and-dried rules. His claims about his discoveries were not modest. From the foreword: 

The general complacency of baseball people -- even those of undoubted intelligence -- toward mathematical examination of what they regard properly and strictly as their own dish of tea is not too astonishing. I would be willing to go as far as pretending to understand why none of four competent and successful executives of second-division ball clubs were most reluctant to employ probabalistic methods of any description ... but they did not even want to hear about them!

 And thus was born a whole new (and rather geeky) endeavor to unlock the secrets of VORP (Value Over Replacement Player), FRAA (Fielding Runs Above Average), and DERA (Defense-adjusted Earned Run Average).

So go ahead, load up on the new editions of Baseball Prospectus, the Bill James Handbook, and the Hardball Times Baseball Annual. But as you sit in front of the TV, calculator in hand, puzzling out the value of a stolen base versus the liability of giving up an out, remember Earnshaw and Percentage Baseball, which we’ve seen fit to bring back in our MIT Press Classics Series. (complete with a lovely black cover!) May the VORP be with you…

Comments

[Ron Kaplan]

I have been a collector of baseball books for many years. I remember purchasing Percentage Baseball waaaay back in the 1960s as a young boy. If it was a book about the national pastime, I wanted it, even if I couldn't understand the material at the time. That it's still available today is quite remarkable. It is the granddaddy of the SABR movement.