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Diamond Dollars is a fresh, provocative, insightful, and analytical look at the business of baseball by author Vince Gennaro, a consultant to MLB teams. Gennaro addresses some key questions that affect how teams make decisions, how they assemble their roster, and ultimately, their bottom line: How does winning affect revenues for each team? How much value does a berth in the postseason generate for the Red Sox and Yankees? What is the Yankees’ marginal revenue vs. marginal cost of winning? What is the economic value of a highly productive Twins’ farm system? Why is a player’s value “situational”, depending on the competitiveness of his team and the market in which he plays? How muc...
A comprehensive analysis of the entire 2007 baseball season from the first pitch to the last out, including a breakdown of the post season and the World Series. Key features include: ? Reviews of how 2005 played out in each of baseball's six divisions ? An in-depth look at the minor leagues ? Detailed team stats and graphs ? Team-by-team individual hitting and fielding numbers ? A postseason and World Series round up
"We’re all winners, as Dayn Perry serves as our trusted guide on this idiosyncratic but profoundly informative walking tour of the great teams and players of the last few decades." —Rob Neyer, ESPN.com "Dayn Perry's really got something here. Part history, part handbook, Winners is an essential read for anyone trying to understand how great teams get that way." —Joe Sheehan, BaseballProspetus.com "We look at baseball from so many angles today that we too often forget the point is not to look at the game from an interesting view for its own sake, but to learn how it works, in the service of learning why teams win. Any fan who wants to know will find their answers in this book." —Tim Marchman, baseball columnist, The New York Sun "Dayn Perry crafts a lively narrative that blends astute analysis with clever storytelling. He gets to the bottom of what makes a great team tick." —Kevin Towers, General Manager and Executive Vice President, San Diego Padres
"He never felt like a Hall of Famer." "You can't argue with championships." "If he was so good, why were his teams so bad?" On talk shows and in sports bars, statements like these are often made about both underrated and overrated players. It's generally accepted that being in a bigger market or on a winning team can cause a player to be overrated, while the opposite can leave them underrated. Examining pennant races to show how much attention a team receives and which teams are getting the most attention provides a context to this familiar commentary. This book studies the effects of the sports media spotlight (and its absence) on the fortunes of teams in pennant races and Hall of Fame inductees. Along the way, the author brings to light accomplished players most non-fans have probably never heard of.
Since he first began publishing his Baseball Abstracts in the 1980s, Bill James has constantly challenged conventional wisdom by asking simple questions like, "Is that really true?" or "What if we looked at the question this way?" He has sparked a virtual revolution in the way the game of baseball is understood and played, from how players are evaluated or positioned to whether or not they should attempt to bunt or steal a base. In Solid Fool s Gold James continues his lifelong work with new analyses of: Hot pitchers, clutch pitching, and "late career" players The predictability of RBI A better way to organize the minor leagues The 33 best starting rotations and the worst teams of all time T...
Baseball analysts often criticize pitcher win-loss records as a poor measure of pitcher performance, as wins are the product of team performance. Fans criticize WAR (Wins Above Replacement) because it takes in theoretical rather than actual wins. Player won-lost records bridge the gap between these two schools of thought, giving credit to all players for what they do--without credit or blame for teammates' performance--and measuring contributions to actual team wins and losses. The result is a statistic of player value that quantifies all aspects of individual performance, allowing for robust comparisons between players across different positions and different seasons. Using play-by-play data, this book examines players' won-lost records in Major League Baseball from 1930 through 2015.
In this second collection of recent articles (the first was Solid Fool's Gold), groundbreaking sabermetrician and baseball historian Bill James takes his unique way of looking at the world and applies it to topics as diverse as the major league players who went out on top, whether ground ball pitchers are as good (or as bad) as people think, do hitters like Yasiel Puig have hot hand streaks (they do) and why (that's a different question), and do teams have tough stretches and soft patches in their schedules (they do) and how to mention them. Along the way, James takes several detours to discuss his views on classical music, fiction versus non-fiction, keeping will animals in captivity, conservatives and liberals, and several other things that interest or offend him. He even includes a couple of his favorite old baseball stories and a new way to summarize something's or someone's history in exactly 10-25-50-100-200-500 words.
This annual baseball reference guide includes pitcher projections, base running analysis, hitter projections, team efficiency summaries, player win-shares, manager's records, and more.
Providing a user-friendly explanation of the increasingly complex statistics used in baseball, this guide includes a historical breakdown of statistics, definitions of all the stats currently used in baseball, practical uses of stats, and a discussion of the future of statistics in baseball.
Over the past few decades, a multitude of advanced hitting, pitching, fielding and base running measures have been introduced to the baseball world. This comprehensive sabermetrics primer will introduce you to these new statistics with easy to understand explanations and examples. It will illustrate the evolution of statistics from simple traditional measures to the more complex metrics of today. You will learn how all the statistics are connected to winning and losing games, how to interpret them, and how to apply them to performance on the field. By the end of this book, you will be able to evaluate players and teams through statistics more thoroughly and accurately than you could before.