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Bob Gustafson's Reviews > The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball
The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball
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I have some mathematical acumen and I'm a baseball fan, so based on reviews of this book, it had five stars before I open the cover. ("Open the cover" is a figure of speech. I bought the Kindle edition.)
The first chapter is an introduction and a definition of terms section. Fine. Analysis begins in chapter two. The text reads like an article from Nature or Science magazines with technical jargon in every sentence. The text is full of tables necessary to make points and are very good. Sadly, their rendering in the Kindle edition is miniscule and you have to have the patience of a saint and the manual dexterity of a concert pianist to enlarge them so that they can be read. (By the way, graphic rendition of any e-book is the responsibility of the publisher, NOT of Amazon.) So buy a print edition.
After reading the first few chapters, this began to wear on me, so my rating dropped to four stars. As I became weary of the analysis, I started skipping paragraphs and going to summary paragraphs that begin with THE BOOK SAYS. These summary paragraphs are excellent. The first few chapters are about player behavior, such as batting streaks, clutch performances, etc. and really challenged the "conventional wisdom".
The next few chapters dealt with team performance. They were much the same as the first few chapters although here THE BOOK differed with conventional wisdom less often. More great analysis, but not particularly entertaining reading. It went down to three stars.
The last few chapters dealt with the intersection of game theory and statistics, where there were fewer statistics to work with. This was done well, although the authors noted that an entire book could be written on applications of game theory alone.
As I finished reading and thought about this review I decided to give this four stars, the average of five stars for statistical analysis and three stars for literature. If that's fine with you, go out and buy the print edition of this book.
The first chapter is an introduction and a definition of terms section. Fine. Analysis begins in chapter two. The text reads like an article from Nature or Science magazines with technical jargon in every sentence. The text is full of tables necessary to make points and are very good. Sadly, their rendering in the Kindle edition is miniscule and you have to have the patience of a saint and the manual dexterity of a concert pianist to enlarge them so that they can be read. (By the way, graphic rendition of any e-book is the responsibility of the publisher, NOT of Amazon.) So buy a print edition.
After reading the first few chapters, this began to wear on me, so my rating dropped to four stars. As I became weary of the analysis, I started skipping paragraphs and going to summary paragraphs that begin with THE BOOK SAYS. These summary paragraphs are excellent. The first few chapters are about player behavior, such as batting streaks, clutch performances, etc. and really challenged the "conventional wisdom".
The next few chapters dealt with team performance. They were much the same as the first few chapters although here THE BOOK differed with conventional wisdom less often. More great analysis, but not particularly entertaining reading. It went down to three stars.
The last few chapters dealt with the intersection of game theory and statistics, where there were fewer statistics to work with. This was done well, although the authors noted that an entire book could be written on applications of game theory alone.
As I finished reading and thought about this review I decided to give this four stars, the average of five stars for statistical analysis and three stars for literature. If that's fine with you, go out and buy the print edition of this book.
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Reading Progress
February 27, 2017
–
Started Reading
February 27, 2017
– Shelved
March 9, 2017
–
Finished Reading
