Acc13's Reviews > The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball

Pretty dry and dense, but fascinating if you are into baseball stats and sabermetrics.
For those who can make it through, the reward is a deeper understanding of the game and a more satisfying spectating experience.

The book tackled some great questions I had as a baseball fan - like the best situations for the steal and the bunt, how well batter/pitcher history predicts future face-offs, how real/useful hot/cold streaks are, how to optimize batting lineup and how much affect it has on wins, quantifying how a disruptive baserunner affects the defense (and batter), etc.
The answers to these questions are approached systematically and scientifically; and Tom Tango can easily be contacted for questions from his blog.

The final chapter on game theory and baseball is unique and missing from many other sabr resources (many situations do not have a always/never rule, and both teams should always be adjusting and mixing their strategies); while the appendix delving into the underlying statistical methods requires some supplementary material for full comprehension for those with further interest in the math (probably small minority of readers).

And although all this insight and analysis is applied to "just a game," the takeaways regarding predictive value of historical data, and statistical significance etc. are useful in many other areas (say, pay/evaluation for doctors or medical institutions, instead of baseball players).
This book presents an excellent example of the power and shortcomings of applied statistics in general.