|
The Baseball Economist: The Real Game Exposed | 
 enlarge | Author: J.c. Bradbury
Publisher: Dutton Adult
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $5.99
You Save: $18.96 (76%)
New (7) Used (14) from $2.75
Avg. Customer Rating:  13 reviews
Sales Rank: 25125
Format: Bargain Price
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6 x 1.3
Dewey Decimal Number: 796.357640973
ASIN: B000Z4LUW8
Publication Date: March 15, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
|
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Freakonomics meets Moneyball in this provocative expose of baseballs most fiercely debated controversies and some of its oldest, most dearly held mythsexplained through the language of numbers and cool cash. Two hot topics team up in The Baseball Economist, and the result is a refreshing, clear- eyed survey of a playing field that has changed radically in recent years. Utilizing the latest economic methods and statistical analysis, writer, economics professor, and popular blogger J. C. Bradbury dissects burning baseball topics with his original Sabernomic perspective, such as:
Did steroids have nothing to do with the recent home run records? Incredibly, Bradburys research, reviewed by Stanford economists, reveals steroids had little statistical significance.
Is the big-city versus small-city competition really lopsided? Bradbury shows why the Marlins and Indians are likely to dominate big-city franchises in the coming years.
Which players are ridiculously overvalued? Bradbury lists all players by team with their revenue value to the team listed in dollarsincluding a dishonor role of those players with negative values.
Is major league baseball a monopoly that cant govern itself? Bradbury sets out what rules the owners really need to play by, and what the players union should be doing.
Does it help to lobby for balls and strikes? How would Babe Ruth perform in todays game? And who killed all the left-handed catchers, anyway? The Baseball Economist knows. Providing far more than a mere collection of numbers, Bradbury shines the light of his economic thinking on baseball, exposing the power of tradeoffs, competition, and incentives. Statistics alone arent enough anymore. Fans, fantasy buffs, and players, as well as coaches at all levels who want to grasp what is really happening on the field today and in the coming years, will use and enjoy Bradburys brilliant new understanding of the national pastime.
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 8 more reviews...
Some great stat analysis August 16, 2008
I found this book worth reading overall, with a few flaws. The author shines on the sections that are more pure statistical analysis to argue a particular point about the multifaceted game of baseball. The chapter on left handed catchers is a good one, as well as the section on how we judge hitters and pitchers' stats. In addition, though he is a college professor, he makes the statistical analysis reasonably accessible to the general public, and some sections could easily be used as interesting supplemental reading in microeconomics first year courses (especially if your audience are 19 year olds who would rather be hitting college balls then sitting in your course). The book weakens when he wanders into more policy territory (a la Freakonomics, the current trendy thing to do), as he tends to argue points by basically stating the data doesn't prove anything. The chapter on steroid use is a prime example. He also at times risks turning baseball into a pure commodity, rather than seeing the entertainment angle - what can one expect from a guy who has no problem with having advertisements on the baselines. Nonetheless, I found this book to be generally well-researched and thought-provoking.
As a final note, he quotes heavily from the book Moneyball, and I would recommend reading that book first before this one. (I did not)
 Economics only partly explains human behavior July 20, 2008
This book is good at raising interesting questions and providing an analytical viewpoint. It suffers from the two main limitations of classical economics.
First, any analysis of a complex system with many interdependent variables requires making many assumptions. There is simply not enough data to control for everything. The author gets credit for effort, but almost every conclusion he draws could be seriously argued the other way.
Second, humans are not purely economic creatures. Sure, we respond to incentives, but we also behave irrationally. We get emotionally attached to teams and players, we live by superstitions, we are convinced that Brand X is better simply because we saw more ads for it. This book's old-style economic vantage point is ripe for challenge. Every conclusion here deserves a huge chunk of salt.
I am especially troubled about the author's treating of baseball like a physical commodity. Baseball is not a widget, it is entertainment. A more modern treatment would compare baseball to the music business or the movies, where network effects, brand, costless replication, venue, and fashion are the main drivers, not old-fashioned supply and demand for a limited product. There's another, better, book waiting to be written here by some other author whose specialty is the economics of modern media.
The book could be written better. In several places the logical introduction of ideas is misarranged, and in others the dryness parches the throat. Still, if you like baseball and your team has got lame announcers like most do, this book is worth a read. (If you live in San Francisco with the best play-by-play and color announcers in the business, then might as well save this book for the off-season.)
"One More Groundball with Eyes": Economics, Sabermetrics and the National Pastime April 15, 2008
On Sunday, Dustin Pedroia made a dumb base running decision on the ball he hit off the Monster at Fenway Park, stopping after he rounded first then continuing on to second. The Red Sox had one out and nobody on, but according to sabermetrics, it was a good at-bat as his on-base percentage went up! Economist and baseball fan, J.C. Bradbury has produced a good enjoyable book using sabermetrics and microeconomics. His look into the on-field probabilities, general managerial decisions and the economics of the league are not without problems but are intriguing and at times enlightening.
As a baseball fan, part one - "On The Field" - interested me the most. He opens the book looking into the difference of Hit Batsmen between the American and National Leagues. The varying rules regarding the DH allow him to use the law of demand and the ideas of opportunity costs, which should interest an economist in baseball and a baseball fan in economics as a tool for understanding more than money. His theories into the dearth of left-handed catchers are good: Bradbury feels that the demand for pitchers with good arms means that lefties are more likely at a young age to be pushed that way then to the tools of ignorance. However, he doesn't look into what I always thought was the greatest hindrance to lefty catchers, most batters are right handed, and therefore the throw to second is generally that much more difficult. I would like to see somebody compare SB percentages when there is a lefty at bat, before I become unconvinced of it.
As an economist, I am most interested in part four - "What Field?" - where Bradbury looks into the economics of baseball teams, tickets, etc. He looks to the theory of monopoly and competition to show the optimal prices of tickets, teams in the leagues and games played in a season. For ticket prices, he shows a great example of discriminatory pricing between teams, rather than the more obvious between seats. How can baseball as a whole discriminate in prices between Kansas City's $18 a seat average and Boston's $44? Despite the obvious, I'd never pay $44 to see the Royals; Bradbury also shows that any monopoly with a grasp of its buyers is able to do this and that baseball is an example of economics in general.
Where he gets off track is the same old problem many baseball fans have with sabermetrics in general. The first is his look at the on-deck hitter. He tries to show that, in aggregates, the talent of the on-deck hitter does affect the pitches thrown to the batter. How does he make these decisions? You know, On Base Percentage! Yet, I have just two great examples of the fallacy of this. How many times was Roger Maris intentionally walked in 1961, when he hit 61 home runs? The answer is zero, because Mickey Mantle was batting behind him. The second example is a game I saw in 2001 involving the Red Sox. The Sox take out Carl "Dinosaurs Didn't Exist" Everett for Darren Lewis, as a defensive replacement in the seventh - .250 career hitter Darren Lewis. When the other team tied the game, between the 8th and 18th they intentionally walked Manny Ramirez four times, because Darren Lewis would just ground into a double play on the next at-bat, and the Sox couldn't score. Yet, this would not be shown in his look at the stats, because Manny's OBP and OPS actually went up in the game! Surely had the other team had been able to score to win the game, part of it was because Everett wasn't batting behind Manny.
Here's the other problem OBP versus the ability to hit in the clutch. Bradbury says: "The problem is that hitting with RISP [runners in scoring position] is not a skill, or at least not much of one we can identify, but a statistical anomaly" (155). Further he argues: "If a hitting with RISP is something a hitter can purposely alter, I have a hard time believing he is holding something back in non-RISP situations" (156). I have two arguments against this idea. First, Pat Tabler, in his 12-year career Tabler hit .282 for his career. But, with the bases loaded he hit 43 for 88 (.488). Surely, over 88 at-bats there must be some sort of edge. My second argument is David Ortiz!
Turning to pitchers, the road is even murkier. He looks to defensive independent pitching stats ERA, whereby if one looks not to a pitcher's ERA but to how he does when ball are out of play - walks, strikeouts and homeruns - we get a better metric of how good a pitcher is because he could have a good or terrible defense behind him. This is all well and good, but I've watched Pedro Martinez and Greg Maddux enough to know that there are some pitchers that when push comes to shove make better pitches in pressure situations. Strangely enough, these statisticians find the best pitchers who have the best ERAs have the best ERAs when the ball does not go into play. So?
Then there is the look at general managers. Specifically he looks to Bill Beane and his Oakland A's "Moneyball." Bradbury shows that Beane, using sabermetrics and undervalued players was able to field a team that made it to the playoffs four of the six times between 2000 and 2005 with a payroll one third of the league average. While this is impressive, the A's won 8 playoff games in that six year run. To win the World Series you must win 11 playoff games in one year. Apparently good GMs can take your teams to the playoffs, but then its just luck? Or, is it that you need more than aggregates when you get there?
If one were to extrapolate from the ideas of no clutch hitting, wouldn't there be no clutch pitching? Yet, Bradbury accepts that there are pitchers who are better at certain situations. Otherwise I would have tried to make Mariano Rivera a starter so he could pitch more of his team's innings, right? Despite some of its misplaced assumptions, I find that the book is an easy read. Although Bradbury would have been better placed on page 137 to quote Crash Davis from Bull Durham:
"You know what the difference is between hitting .250 and hitting .300? 1 got it figured out. Twenty-five hits a year in 500 at bats is 50 points. Okay? There's 6 months in a season, that's about 25 weeks - you get one extra flare a week - just one - a gork, a ground ball with eyes, a dying quail - just one more dying quail a week and you're in Yankee Stadium!"
than his own similar description of the same statistical phenomenon. Still I think this book is a must for any baseball fan after the Baseball Abstract and the Baseball Encyclopedia. Additionally for anyone teaching an intro to economics or intermediate micro class I would assign some of the chapters as "optional reading" for sports fans. The monopoly and hit batsmen sections could really bring these things into greater clarity. Overall: 3 stars.
 Wonderful book for any baseball stat head February 17, 2008
I just finished reading The Baseball Economist: The Real Game Exposed the other night. If you're not a baseball fan then you can skip the rest of this post without offending me. Besides being a book about something that I love, this book was written by a Wofford alum! All the more reason to reason to read it! The author J.C. Bradbury runs an interesting blog, Sabernomics, where he writes all sorts of interesting baseball articles. Sometimes they are specifically Atlanta Braves related articles, but they run the gamut from free agent player values to, and most recently, the steroid situation.
This book was absolutely fantastic and one that I would highly recommend to anyone that is either a fan of the game or loves statistics. Because the subject of the book is baseball, the regression analysis and formulas presented seem to flow naturally. The chapters are perfectly sized analysis in themselves that each make for an evening sit-down.
With chapters like "The Legendary Power of the On-Deck Hitter", "The Evolution of Baseball Talent", and "Scouts vs. Stat-Head" you know that you have something interesting in your hands. J.C. does a masterful job of laying statistical data to support his conclusions without losing the reader.
My personal favorite chapter, "The Extinct Left-Handed Catcher," looks at why there is no such thing as a left-handed catcher in baseball. J.C. looks for performance reasons and ultimately concludes "the benefits of using right-handed catchers are small, maybe the costs will yield some answers." These costs ultimately show their solution in the very simple revelation: "The biggest reason there is no left-handed catchers is natural selection. Catchers need good throwing arms. If you have a kid on your baseball team who is left-handed and has a strong arm, what are you going to do with him?" Any baseball person can easily answer this, he's going to pitch!
The entire book was filled with revelations similar to this! Every chapter brought statistical analysis into the equation to definitively prove relationships in baseball. Is any of this going to make me a better baseball player, coach, or fan? Probably not, but for anyone that has a passion for the sport I'm sure they will feverously consume this book with the same passion. It's obvious that J.C. also shares that passion and it carries through this work.
You can read my other reviews on my blog: http://doteduguru.com
Inquiring Minds Wander from This Book August 25, 2007
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
I work with economic theorists all the time, but I am not going to tell you this is a good book. Pieces of it are. Bradbury dwells on the steriods issue, prattling on and on about the lack of evidence. Yet, no where does he accept the challenge of studying the relative performances of the individuals to determine the effect of steriods. Rather, he just says it has never been proven. He even blurs the distinction of taking steriods for performance reasons vs. health reasons (and he never considers the differences in the steriods themselves!)
Some of his economic observations are interesting, those where he really studies the game and statistics. I, for one, can find other, more rewarding but boring books to give me a Saturday afternoon snooze. And Bradbury should stick to his statistical analysis of the game (where he excels), not the policy points (where he only debates under the ruse of economic theories).
|
|
|
Powered by Associate-O-Matic
| |
