Hey Look! An Actual Book Review!
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We've had quite a lovefest for author/historian and baseball journalist Alan Schwarz here on Batter's Box Interactive Magazine recently, publishing no less than six distinct threads related to his recent appearance at Toronto's Learning Annex. |
That seems like quite enough, wouldn't you think? Oh no, certainly not. In fact, quite recently another member of the Roster, who shall go nameless here, dropped me an e-mail, the essence of which read "Yo, nimrod." (I am paraphrasing here.) "All this, and don't you think it'd be smooth if we included an actual review of Schwarz's book?"
Oh yeah! So here we go ...
This is a really, really good book. (No, that's not the complete review, though in a nutshell it probably could be.) Of the many dozens of comments from and by various Bauxites since the Alan Schwarz Experience started here six weeks ago, perhaps the most germane came from reader StephenT in the aforenmentioned review of the Learning Annex presentation, when he wrote, "Anyone who writes about baseball is at risk of looking pretty dumb if they don't know this information."
In fact, this insight echoes a line from the ESPN.com review by Daniel Brown, which said in part, "My advice for your next statistical squabble: make sure you have 'The Numbers Game' on your side."
True, StephenT; true, Daniel. And when Schwarz himself, in the Batter's Box group chat interview, said the book was for "people who like reading stories about people. Again, this is a very human book; it's not a bunch of numbers!," it was not -- as might at first be suspected -- a simple case of an author protesting too much. It's actually true -- The Numbers Game isn't about the numbers themselves, for the most part, it's about the people, politics and passions behind those numbers.
The only thing that keeps this book from being a pantheon baseball book, like The Boys of Summer and Ball Four is the very occasional side trips that Schwarz does take into examining how a number is derived or into breaking down a complex formula in a way that frankly causes the eyes of the non-statistical reader (such as me) to glaze over for brief intervals. But honestly, knowing going into the book that Schwarz had been a math major, I expected there to be far more of this sort of thing, and there was very little.
Instead, the book is rife with the stories of people like Eric Walker, Si Siwoff, John Dewan and. among others, names that probably ring more familiar bells to current baseball fans, like Dan Evans, Paul DePodesta, Theo Epstein and yes, Bill James and Billy Beane. Even Toronto's own Keith Law merits a few grafs.
But while this book is no Moneyball decreeing the genius of any of these "new-age" sabermetricians, Schwarz's take on the politics of the issues at hand is pretty easy to figure; while he doesn't openly vilify Siwoff, for instance, he does clearly place him in the role of "bad guy," overprotective of the availability of the raw numbers of baseball statistics for what amounts to more than a generation.
Still, the political intrigue and history that led James to quit publishing his annual tomes, that led to the formation of entities that many fans now take for granted like STATS Inc. and Retrosheet, takes center stage in this book.
Going back to the days of Henry Chadwick, who Schwarz consistently positions as the patron saint of all things statistical in The Great Game, Ernie Lanigan and Al Munro Elias (there's another name that should ring a bell with most Batter's Box readers), the stories of what numbers mattered to what people are the heart of the book.
Because, although Schwarz never comes out and says it directly, it's obvious he believes that we view baseball history, more than perhaps any other kind of history in Americana, through a statistical lens -- and the stories of who determined how that lens would be crafted have, in turn, crafted the very way we think about the game as a whole.
If you want to talk about the history of baseball with anyone who knows anything about it, you really are at risk of looking pretty dumb if you haven't read The Numbers Game. By any count, according to any statistic, this is a really, really good book.
https://www.battersbox.ca/article.php?story=20050710132451180