douglas@noscvax.UUCP (Douglas S. Dickerson) (04/05/85)
This is a shameless plug for the 1985 Bill James Baseball Abstract.
I was not aware of Bill James until a few weeks ago and have had the
Abstract for only a few days. Bill James is a sportswriter and a
practitioner of sabermetrics, "the scientific research of the
available evidence to identify, study and measure forces in
professional baseball". Some examples from the book follow.
In the introduction, James develops a system for adjusting a players
minor league statistics to a Major League Equivalent by accounting
for differences in ball parks and pitching. His system was a
reliable indicator of major league batting performance for 29 of 30
players who spend 1983 in AA or AAA and had more than 250 major
league at bats in 1984. He concludes that good minor league talent
is a far better thing to bet on than "proven" major league talent
that isn't good enough to win. His example of two managers who
already realize this "truth" are Dave Johnson and Dick Williams.
He gives a detailed description of how to implement on the
spreadsheet of your choice his "Brock2" career projection method,
which uses the records a player has produced up to a point in his
career to project the rest of his career.
If you follow the Tigers, as I do, you'll love his 15 position
comparison of the '84 Tigers to the great teams of the last 25 years
('61,'77 Yankees, '67 Cardinals, '70 Orioles, '73 A's, '76 Reds).
He concludes that the individual talents of the '84 Tigers were
substantially as solid as any in the last quarter century.
He also makes a theoretical and empirical (1965-1984) analysis of the
significance of a "hot start" as he was admittedly slow in realizing
there was not going to be a pennant race in the AL East in 1984.
His analysis concludes that after *20* games, when the Tigers were
18-2, he should have been able to predict that they would win
significantly more than 90 games.
The book contains commentary on all the teams and ranks the
individual players in each league at each position. I find his
insights into baseball very enlightening and well worth $7.95.
--
Doug Dickerson UUCP !sdcsvax!noscvax!douglas MILNET douglas@nosc