Best of Baseball Prospectus: 1996-2011

by Baseball Prospectus, Ben Lindbergh (Editor), Sam Miller

For fifteen years, baseballprospectus.com has brought you the very best independent baseball analysis has to offer. Since 2003, Baseball Prospectus has published dozens of exclusive articles every month to subscribers to its groundbreaking Baseball Prospectus Premium service. Now, we're taking the next step by bringing the BP archives to your bookshelf. With extensive input from the founders and long-time staffers who knows a thing or two about BP's past, we've selected 152 of the best articles BP has to offer, representing a comprehensive cross-section of the ground-breaking insight, astute analysis, and witty commentary that you've come to expect from us over the last 15 years.

Genres: Sports, Baseball

452 pages, Paperback

First published December 8, 2011

About the author

Baseball Prospectus is an organization that publishes a website, BaseballProspectus.com, devoted to the sabermetric analysis of baseball. BP has a staff of regular columnists and provides advanced statistics as well as player and team performance projections on the site.

Since 1996 the BP staff has also published a Baseball Prospectus annual as well as several other books devoted to baseball analysis and history.

Reviews

[Clay Kallam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Baseball, as a cynical colleague of mine once said, is a child's game -- and though its rules are somewhat complex, the game is much, much less complex than the reality that surrounds us.

But as with everything, baseball is not nearly as simple as it seems, and the modern statistical analysis of the game has revealed what generations of observers had missed, and at the same time made it clear that what we think we see, in any endeavor, may not be what's really there.

The details of the mathematical analysis of baseball will be of interest to any serious fan, and should make it easier for a more casual observer to enjoy the game, and this book is an excellent introduction to the topic of sabrmetrics, as the field has come to be called. The quality of writing varies, as do the level of insights, but all in all, "The Best of Baseball Prospectus" is not only a worthy addition to any baseball bookshelf, but also a great way to start one.

It's also a good place to start wondering what else has been missed in other fields by simply accepting the received wisdom, and not rigorously analyzing popular assumptions.