New Bill James book

[Dr T Non-Fan]

Whoever has my name for a holiday gift, please get me this.
I recall reading a few of his baseball Abstracts in the 80's. Great stuff.
He got a little cranky in his chat on espn.com.
The extract about the game in the 1990's is dead on.
And, since he's a non-card-carrying Yankees hater, he can't be all bad.

[Anonymous]

I've already asked for it, too. If I don't get it, I'm buying it for myself. I have the original "Historical Abstract" and love it.

I'm disappointed that he introduces a new statistic, but doesn't tell us yet how he calculates the d*mn thing. And I'm confused by the chat exchange on Win Shares and subjectivity. My best guess is that the Shares themselves are completely un-subjective, but that the final ordering of players he presents in the book do include his judgement (i.e., aren't in strict descending order of WSs). Is that how you read him?

He also said he'd never answer a question about why homeruns/scoring have increased so much, yet he devotes a large portion of his 1990s section (excerpted on ESPN) to just that question.

[General Kenobi (ret.)]

Pseud, in the transcript of the ESPN chat, he talks about why he didn't explain how to calculate win shares (because it would have added 100 pages to an already long book), and says that another book due out next year will explain.

[Anonymous]

I know, but it's still cheesy. It sounds like a large portion of his book relies heavily on the output of this new doohickey. How can we understand what the output means if he won't tell us where it came from?

(Caution, poor analogy ahead.)

"My new method indicates we need a rate increase of 11.356234%"

"How does your new method work?"

"I'll tell you four months from now."

"Oh. Ok then. Rate increase approved."

!!STAMP!!

[Anonymous]

Or:

[Draco conspiracy theory (tm)]
"I have this wonderful new statistical method, but I can't fit an explanation of it into the margins of this book."

{Disappears / Drops Dead}
[/Draco conspiracy theory (tm)]

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: PseudolusCAS on 2001-11-15 13:13 ]</font>

[Dr T Non-Fan]

Well, since the book doesn't appear to affect anybody important, I think we can trust Mr James not to screw up something like this for a few months.

Also, on espn.com there was a column by Schoenfield discussing how valuable someone was because of his "Runs Involved In" (I made this term up, seems more appropriate) stat. That's Runs + RBI - HR. It's not there anymore. Maybe Neyer pulled rank.

[Dr T Non-Fan]

Line I liked best:
"The hitter's job is not to hit for average; it's to create runs."

The simplest method is to compare OPS. Then someone has get out a lot while on base, or make lots of errors, or GIDP a lot to merit a second look.

[Anonymous]

Or play in a very distorting home park. Or field like Bill Mazeroski. Or steal an awful lot of bases at a phenomenal success rate.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: PseudolusCAS on 2001-11-15 16:40 ]</font>

[rekrap]

Popular Crime (http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/books/la-et-0518-book-20110520,0,2855901.story)

[Dr T Non-Fan]

Wow, nice roasting.