Practicing Sabermetrics: Putting the Science of Baseball Statistics to Work

by Gabriel B. Costa, Michael Huber, John Saccoman

The past 30 years have seen an explosion in the number and variety of baseball books and articles. Following the lead of pioneers Bill James, John Thorn, and Pete Palmer, researchers have steadily challenged the ways we think about player and team performance--and along the way revised what we thought we knew of baseball history. This book by the authors of Understanding Sabermetrics (2008) goes beyond the explanation of new statistics to demonstrate their use in solving some of the more familiar problems of baseball research, such as how to compare players across generations; how to account for the effects of ballparks and rules changes; and how to measure the effectiveness of the sacrifice bunt or the range of the Gold Glove-winning shortstop. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may .

Genres: Baseball, Sports

240 pages, Paperback

First published October 5, 2009

Reviews

[Aaron · Rating 3 out of 5]

Practicing Sabermetrics is the second of three books on sabermetrics by Costa and his coauthors. The book focuses on roughly twenty non-traditional baseball statistics and then walks through a variety of practice calculations. Some of the topics are useful, including OPS, ISO, and park effects. I particularly appreciated the discussion of linear weights and how they were estimated at different points in sabermetric history. Unfortunately, there are also a number of less useful statistics mixed in, including the Hoban Effectiveness Quotient. As a result, the book does not feel like a particularly up-to-date guide to sabermetrics. It might be useful for an interested high school student or someone looking for basic practice with baseball-stat calculations, but overall I found it only okay.

[Alexander Whyte · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a nice book. It's a nice introduction into the statistics used in baseball.

[Collin · Rating 3 out of 5]

75% of the book are worked out examples or similar questions with just the answers, so if you are just reading for the content it is a quick read.

[Ivan Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the second short book in the series of sabermetric textbooks written by these three authors. It was very enjoyable to read as they put into practice many of the earlier ideas from the other two books to answer some difficult and interesting problems. Again it suffered from multiple typos which were distracting.