Does this count as hot jazz or cool jazz?
Title: Jays Jazz
# pages: 136
Published By: He seems to have published it himself. 1987.
Availability: I would have to regard this book as basically unavailable. Try eBay, I guess, and cross your fingers. I got my copy from This Ain't the Rosedale Library back when they were phasing out their baseball section.
Author: David Driscoll
Who Is: An amateur sabremetrician out of London, Ont., Driscoll wrote the Blue Jays chapter in Bill James's 1985 Baseball Abstract. Jays Jazz is his second annual statistical look at the Jays (the first being The 1985 Blue Book, which I would totally review here, except that I don't have it and don't really expect ever to find it).
I don't know what Driscoll is up to these days. I tried to track him down online, and found a number of David Driscolls, none of which I can say with any confidence is him. (I suspect that someone reading this article will know more about him.)
What's It About: It is, basically, an attempt to write the 1987 Bill James Baseball Abstract, for just the Toronto Blue Jays, for the length of an entire book. I don't mean to slight Driscoll by comparing him to James in this way.
Secret Hero: In one way it's Bill James. In another, maybe Buck Martinez.
How's the Writing: Well... it's good, but. Driscoll has a lot of interesting things to say, and can say them in an engaging way. Only problem is that he needs an editor to restrain him when he gets EMPHATIC! KNOW WHAT I MEAN?!
Anyway. Driscoll did a good job overall, and I'm sure I'll find my way back to this book again.
Sabremetric Corner: The whole book is sabremetrics, really. Driscoll comes up with a lot of different angles on the different players on the team, and, rereading it, I was surprised to find it as interesting as I do, considering that a) it's about stuff that happened over twenty years ago, and b) the sabremetric principles involved are over twenty years old. Among the many topics he covers are: a hitter's performance in the first week after coming back from an injury, percentage of runners driven in, Willie Upshaw's power, and the importance of Gary Lavelle and the seventh inning.
Anecdote: No anecdotes.
https://www.battersbox.ca/article.php?story=20080728213528171