Baseball Statistics

I got The New Bill James Baseball Abstract from the library on Thursday, and I've been looking through it. It would make pretty interesting listening as a book-on-tape for a road trip if summarized well, and if there were other baseball fans in the car. There are sections on baseball in each decade and annotated lists of the best 100 players at each position. James uses Win Shares, which he only partially explains in the book since apparently he has written a whole other book about them, to rate the players; a Win Share is credit (each team gets three for each win) for a player either creating runs offensively or "saving" runs by fielding or pitching. He has a lot of offhand anecdotes within the structured sections, like the fact that Rafael Palmeiro won a Gold Glove at first base in 1994 even though he only played 28 games at the position.

The use of statistics makes for perhaps less interesting arguments than in Andrew Sarris's The American Cinema, which is a similar undertaking, but ultimately this is a more interesting kind of book. Although James clearly has a massive amount of knowledge about baseball players throughout history anyway, the reliance on statistics makes the reader consider the numbers rather than complain if a player seems unfairly ranked.

I probably won't read the whole thing, since it's 1000 pages long, but it'll be fun to look through for a while.