Scorecasting is, indeed, Freakonomics for sports. That means it's more focused but also drier, so I don't think I enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed either of the Freakonomics books, but I did think it was, for the most part, convincing and effective.

Naturally, some chapters are better than others. The topic they devote the most space to is home field advantage, and their number seem to demonstrate pretty convincingly that it comes down to referee bias. The chapters I liked best, though, were the ones that reaffirmed things I already suspected: defense doesn't really win any more championships than offense does, high draft picks in the NFL are ridiculously overvalued, icing the kicker doesn't work, the Cubs aren't unlucky (as long as you're defining "luck" to actually mean fortune/chance), and NFL coaches should go for it on 4th down more than they do. I thought the only notably weak chapter was when they took on "There's No I in Team" in the game of basketball. They tried to prove that teams with "superstars" win more games than balanced teams, but they failed to bring up the first thing I thought of: players on teams that win a lot are much more likely to be defined as "superstars." A great player on a horrible team won't get nearly as many All-Star votes or lucrative contracts as the same player would on a great team. I wanted Moskowitz and Wertheim to adjust for that, but they never did. Other than that, the book's flaws are minor.