Reddit Reddit reviews The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball

We found 19 Reddit comments about The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball
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19 Reddit comments about The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball:

u/puck_puck · 10 pointsr/baseball
  • The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract This book will give you a great overview of the game from 1870 to 1999. Breaks the game down by decades and what the game was like and how it changed. Also ranks the top 100 players at each position. Really anything by James is an entertaining read, but this is the must have for baseball conversation.
  • Baseball Prospectus - Baseball Between the Numbers A good introductory course into the newer sabrmetrics. It will answer many questions in depth about what was going on as far as player evaluation in Moneyball.
  • Tom Tango - The Book Much more advanced sabrmetrics but very current and groundbreaking. The author started on the internet, and last offseason secured a job working for the Seattle Mariners.

    The next three are to give you a better view of the game from the players/owners perspective.

  • Veeck as in Wreck Bill Veeck was one hell of a guy. His father was president of the Cubs in the 30's, and Bill would go on to own his fair share of teams. Always an individual, he stood against the baseball ownership cabal on many occasions. Spent the last years of his life watching the Cubs from the center field bleachers. His autobiography is humorous and insightful. A must read for any baseball fan.
  • Buck O'Neil - I was Right on Time Called the soul of negro league baseball, Buck O'Neil recounts his playing days in the negro leagues, and covers many of the legends in a very matter of fact way.
  • Jim Bouton - Ball Four Last but not least is former Yankee star, now washed up knuckleballer Jim Bouton recalling the inaugural season of the short lived Seattle Pilots. Baseball players in all their vulgar glory. Also will teach you the fine art of "shooting beaver".
u/SouthernDerpfornia · 7 pointsr/baseball

The Book is a good intro to saber stats

u/boilface · 7 pointsr/baseball

If you're familiar with math/stats, read The Book by Tom Tango. It provides excellent explanations of many statistics and shows the math behind all of the weights they use.

u/thedailynathan · 4 pointsr/baseball

I've got a feeling you may already know of this, but I would highly recommend "The Book" to you, maybe check it out the from the library or something:

http://www.amazon.com/Book-Playing-Percentages-Baseball/dp/1597971294/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1314312408&sr=8-1

It's a statistical look at baseball and specifically focuses on quantifying the value of a lot of these ideas - e.g. how much benefit do you get from batting the pitcher 8th vs 9th (to give you an "extra" leadoff hitter), or something similar to your idea, a 6 or 7 man rotation where the 4th and 5th starter positions are actually a committee of relievers working ~3 inning "starts". Like you already know, it's an idea that really has legs because oftentimes non-elite starting pitchers are actually decent on their first go, but get bombed the 2nd and 3rd times through the batting order after the hitters have gotten a look or two on them.

u/KobraCola · 3 pointsr/SFGiants

>##Why Joey Votto should bat second

>April, 30, 2013

>10:39 AM ET

>By Keith Law | ESPN.com


>The Los Angeles Angels have been batting Mike Trout, their best all-around hitter, second for most of this season. The Cincinnati Reds could learn a thing or two from that.

>The idea of putting your best hitter second, rather than third, is still a novel one within baseball and has yet to gain widespread acceptance, even though the evidence in favor of such an arrangement is pretty strong. Using metrics such as batting runs, estimating the runs gained or lost through changing a lineup, shifting to an optimal lineup is only worth about 10-15 runs, or just over a win, in the course of a full season. That said, the marginal gain in getting your best hitter another handful of at-bats, including extra at-bats at the end of games, makes it worth trying to capture value that otherwise would be squandered.

>The Reds are the best example this year of a team that is giving away offense by putting their worst hitter, Zack Cozart, ahead of their best hitter, Joey Votto, an example of archaic thinking that still persists within the game because that's how we've always done it.

>Same as it ever was

>Traditionally, the No. 2 hitter is supposed to be a table-setter who can put the ball in play, drop a bunt, hit behind a runner, and so on. This is all hogwash, of course: The No. 2 hitter has the same basic job as all of the other guys in the lineup -- to get his posterior to first base any way he can.

>To put it another way, his job is to avoid making an out. As an industry, we spend too much time praising players for doing "little things" -- every round of applause a player gets for grounding out and getting a guy from second to third makes me die a little inside -- and that glorification has led to this piffle about the two-hole hitter being a certain type of player, rather than just a really good hitter, period.

>Each lineup spot gets about 2.5 percent more appearances than the one after it over the course of a season, or roughly another plate appearance every 8-9 games. (That stat, and much of the information in this article, comes from the very useful "The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball," by Tom Tango, Mitchel Lichtman, and Andrew Dolphin, which has a whole chapter examining lineup construction that goes well beyond what I'm discussing here.)

>The obvious implication is that you want to load your best hitters up at the top of the lineup, and to put your worst hitters near the bottom of it. Even flipping Cozart and Votto (not that you'd hit Cozart third, but just hypothetically) would convert about 10 outs per year into times on base, assuming 150 games played for each player and using their OBPs of the past few years.

>Of course, you don't want to put your best overall hitter, someone who gets on base but also hits for power, in the leadoff spot, because his first plate appearances come with the bases empty and the remainder will come with fewer men on base because he's hitting behind the No. 8 and 9 hitters. Tango et al, showed that historically the leadoff spot has far fewer PAs with men on base (36 percent, with no other spot below 44 percent) than any other lineup position, making it an ideal spot for a high-OBP but low-power hitter.

>For the Angels, that's not Trout, who slugged .564 last season with 30 homers and belongs in a position where he can deploy that power to knock some guys in, while also getting on base for the hitters behind him. (Sadly, the Angels don't really have a high-OBP guy for the leadoff spot; Peter Bourjos' .370 mark this season is way out of line with his career OBP of .307.)

>Conventional wisdom says you put your best overall hitter third, and to this day most teams still do just that. Tango et al, point out, again with historical data, that when you consider the plate appearances each lineup spot receives, as well as the frequency with which each lineup spot gets each base-out situation*, a team's best hitter belongs in the No. 2 spot: It comes up about 2.5 percent more often over the course of a year, and generates more value with almost every way of reaching base due to who's typically on base and with how many outs. That is, a single or a double or a walk from the No. 2 hitter is worth more in run-scoring potential than the same event from a No. 3 hitter. The numbers are all very close, but the No. 2 hitter gets those extra 15 or so plate appearances a year, and the No. 3 hitter, on average, leads off the fewest number of innings, which is another reason not to put your highest OBP guy there.

>*There are 24 base-out situations: 0, 1, or 2 outs, as well as eight configurations of runners on base from bases empty to bases loaded. These are the 24 base-out scenarios found in a run expectancy table, that tells you how many runs you can expect to score given a number of outs and a configuration of men on base. It also tells you that giving up an out via a sacrifice bunt is generally stupid.

>Free runs!

>These gains are small but real, and freely available to any team. What's a little less evident immediately from these studies -- again, I refer you to "The Book" for the data itself -- is the very real, almost binary benefit a team may get once or twice a year in the ninth inning from batting, say, Joey Votto second instead of Zack Cozart.

>According to Dan Szymborski, in nine-inning games the past 10 years, the last out was made by the No. 2 batter 11.7 percent of the time, about what you'd expect given nine lineup spots with a slight skew toward spots near the top. (A straight 1-in-9 shot would be 11.1 percent.)

>In other words, in about 19 games a year, the No. 3 hitter was left standing in the on-deck circle, forever alone. With one-run games accounting for about a quarter of each team's schedule last year -- the Reds were 31-21 in such games, so nearly a third of their games were decided by a run -- that would mean on average about five games a year where the team's best hitter doesn't get a last chance to bat. It might be only one or two such games, and it could be more than five, but the point is that there is never a game where you should be comfortable losing by a run while your best hitter stands on deck watching a clearly inferior two-hole hitter make the final out.

>And a win coming from that situation isn't a hypothetical win from 10 runs produced on aggregate over a season -- it's a binary variable, a loss turned into a win, the kind that shows up in the standings and that people who work with baseball statistics are often absurdly accused of ignoring.

>If you can get one more win a year from optimizing your lineup this way, with no downside whatsoever, shouldn't you do it? And shouldn't any manager who hits a guy with a career .283 OBP second (Cozart), ahead of a guy (Votto) with a career .417 OBP (.445 this year, .474 last year), be held accountable for that decision? Put your best hitter second, your next-best hitter fourth, your high-OBP/low-power guy first, and you get, in effect, free runs, maybe just a handful over the course of a season, but maybe that one marginal at-bat in the ninth inning turns into a very real, tangible win, the kind that teams are supposed to be pursuing anyway.

>The conventional wisdom here is wrong, and all it took was a few guys to question it and look at the data to explain to us why.

Video from the article at the bottom

Edit: I made a hypothetical Giants line-up based on this evidence, Giants players' 2013 stats, and today's line-up, just for fun:

Marco Scutaro 2B

Buster Posey C

Brandon Belt 1B

Hunter Pence RF

Brandon Crawford SS

Pablo Sandoval 3B

Gregor Blanco CF

Roger Kieschnick LF (No offense to Keesh, there's just not enough big league stats on him yet to see what he's really made of at this level)

Pitcher's spot

After staring at and thinking about this lineup for a while, I actually like it a lot. Someone text Boch, stat!

u/Distance_Runner · 3 pointsr/baseball

I'll be going to graduate school in Statistics, so as an avid baseball fan, I'm also fascinated with Sabermetrics.

Here are some books I recommend

For a good first book, I recommend either Beyond Batting Average or Understanding Sabermetrics: An Introduction to the Science of Baseball Statistics or Baseball Between the Numbers.... All of those books provide good introductions to the subject

My favorite book would have to be, The Book: Playing Percentages in Baseball. Compared to the first three I mentioned, this book is a bit more complex, but I think it's the best because it's the most thorough.

u/chuckyjc05 · 2 pointsr/baseball

Anyone that finds this stuff cool should read The Book

u/[deleted] · 2 pointsr/Sabermetrics

The Fangraphs leaderboards are hugely helpful for quick analysis. You can use the custom leaderboard feature at the bottom to combine leaderboards for different types of stats - for example putting BB%,K%,FIP, alongside Pitch F/X and batted ball stats. And you can export any leaderboard into Excel. I've spent countless hours over the past 5 years with that stuff.

Not sure how much research/reading you've done, but I'd highly suggest reading The Book by Tom Tango and MGL. It will give you an excellent base level understanding of how things work.

The Fangraphs glossary has helpful explanations of how stats work.

Another worthwhile research tool is Baseball-Reference's Play Index. It's worth the subscription fee.

If you want to go to the next level with Gameday data, you'll need to set up an SQL database. You can download all the data updated daily from Baseball Heat Maps. This is where you can really get into things, but it requires database skills.

If you want to do Pitch F/x without getting into databases, [Brooksbaseball] (http://www.brooksbaseball.net/) is the best tool around.

u/BlueJaysWatch · 2 pointsr/Torontobluejays

Like I said... Based on last years numbers. I wouldn't mind that swap you mentioned, but this is almost exactly by "The Book"

http://www.amazon.ca/The-Book-Playing-Percentages-Baseball/dp/1597971294

u/TheBiggestSloth · 2 pointsr/baseball

The Book. Great if you want to learn about sabermatrics.

u/triple_dee · 2 pointsr/Dodgers

Moneyball helped me enter the world, but actually reading fangraphs has been really good. There's a glossary that's pretty good whenever I see someone commenting on some stat I don't know about.

I'm reading The Book. It's a bit less prose and a bit more...baseball research essay-feeling, but it's interesting. It does get mentioned kind of often when people start asking about advanced stats.

u/texansfan · 2 pointsr/baseball

I am winning my fantasy league this year (finished 4th, 3rd, 3rd last three years), and I'm going all in on stats to do it!

u/ReverseEngineered · 2 pointsr/learnprogramming

Programming is a tool. I suggest finding another interest that you can apply it to. Robots, graphics, music, animation, sports, economics -- the possibilities are endless. Pick your favorite area, look at what kind of problems there are in that area that people use programs to solve, figure out how those sorts of programs work, and try to solve some of those problems yourself.

A few interesting examples:

  • Project Euler has a set of challenges relating to both math and computer science that will stretch you to learn more about both.
  • Python Challenge is basically a series of puzzles that challenge you to do new and interesting things with Python. Granted, several of the puzzles are quite similar and some of the libraries they reference are deprecated, but it's a place to start for programming challenges.
  • Programming Computer Vision With Python talks all about using programs to do things like find objects in pictures and track them even at different sizes and angles. Lots of great examples.
  • Programming Collective Intelligence talks about putting together data from different sources (primarily websites) and finding patterns. It deals with many machine learning concepts in ways that are practical and interesting. Things like modelling and predicting, optimizing, clustering (finding similarities), searching and ranking, and pattern recognition.
  • Arduino Robotics describes many robots you can build with relatively common parts that can be programmed using the inexpensive, C-based Arduino microcontroller platform. I've made several of these myself.
  • Digital Signal Processing is all about writing software that takes advantage of advanced math to manipulate signals in many ways. It's invaluable for audio, but you see it used with graphics, digital communications, and many other areas.
  • There is a subset of sports fans that really enjoy statistics and software can be very valuable for them. Things like comparing players across eras, predicting future performance, and helping to find high-value players. The general field is called Sabremetrics. I looked deep into it in relation to major league baseball. Two books that I found valuable are The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball and Baseball Between the Numbers.
  • Programmable games are cool too. Things like CROBOTS, CoreWar, RoboWar, and Robot Game. It's just as fun building the simulation environment as it is building the bots that compete within them.
  • Pick up any book on algorithms. Learn to apply the basics like binary search, insertion sort, radix sort, memoization and linear programming, Dijkstra's algorithm, and Newton's method for root finding.
  • Grab another book on data structures. Make sure you understand the differences between arrays, linked lists, hash tables, and trees. Learn about unique and useful things like binary trees, radix trees, heaps, and queues.
  • Learn how to write better code. I recommend books like Code Complete and The Pragmatic Programmer.

    Whatever you do, as you clearly pointed out, you have to be interested in it or you'll grow bored and give up. Find something that is interesting to you and pursue it as wide and deep as you can.
u/bwadams12 · 1 pointr/baseball

If you haven't read The Book by Tom Tango et al, you're absolutely missing out.

Also, whatever the most recent edition of Baseball Prospectus is, those are always a blast in the offseason.

u/adamadamadam · 1 pointr/baseball

For those interested, The Book that dbeeaitch referenced is top notch. Even if you're not great at math, the authors do a pretty good job of explaining the "take-home" value of the statistics, e.g. if you've got a good OPS but tend to hit in a lot of double plays, you should bat first.

u/RoyaleWithCheese88 · 1 pointr/baseball

There's a whole chapter about it in The Book.

They looked at 300 different batter/pitcher matchups and found that there was no correlation whatsoever between past and future performance. The sample size is just much too small. Here's the takeaway:

>Knowing a player will face a particular opponent, and given the choice between that player's 1,500 PA over the past three years against the rest of the league, or twenty-five PA against that particular opponent, look at the 1,500 PA.

u/mega_shit · 0 pointsr/Mariners

> sorry but best hitter in the #4 slot is a filthy lie fed to us by cotchety old baseball managers who talk about grit and sac bunt way too often

The Book says your best hitter goes in #2 or #4 spot:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Book-Playing-Percentages-Baseball/dp/1597971294