Last minute holiday gifts for baseball fans are always a bit problematic. It is the off-season after all. How about a book?
The Hardball Times Annual 2007 and the Bill James Handbook arrived at my home this month, and I opened them with the anticipation of someone 20 years younger. The Hardball Times website is a regular daily stopping point for me, for the fascinating statistics, thoughtful analysis and entertaining writing. And as for Bill James, how about saying that he is the pre-eminent baseball analyst of the last 30 years, and leaving it at that. I wish that I could recommend these books unreservedly, but that is impossible.
It is becoming harder and harder to write an annual with insights about major league baseball. The information that is freely available on the internet is astounding, courtesy of thehardballtimes.com, baseballprospectus.com, baseballreference.com, baseballanalysts.com, retrosheet.org, baseballmusings.com and many others. It still would be possible to distil much of the information that surrounds players and teams (as the old Bill James annual abstracts did) into a useful and interesting package, but neither of these books achieves that difficult goal.
Instead, both books have collections of material of varying interest and quality. The best material is purely original work. In the Hardball Times Annual, that would be John Walsh's historical study of outfield arms. Kill rates and hold rates are calculated for outfielders from the "retrosheet era", covering the careers and peers of Roberto Clemente, Jesse Barfield, and Vladimir Guerrero. In this case, the results were entirely expected for me, but it is still very helpful to see the data and may be of special interest for those who did not see Jesse Barfield. In the Bill James Handbook, the original work on 2006 player baserunning (advancement rates, outs on the bases, bases taken) was interesting and useful.
The Hardball Times Annual also contains a summaries of the 2006 season from the perspectives of each of the teams, and also of the post-season. The team summaries may be something that I will look back in 20 years, as I do the old Biil James annual abstracts, and find nuggets of gold, but for now, they seem to be a less thorough review of what I read every day on the internet. The same can be said of the post-season summary.
The Hardball Times statistical package on its website is probably the best available on the internet, for the breadth and helpful presentation of the "ball in play" information, breakdowns for pitchers and batters of batted ball type- ground ball, fly ball, and pop-up, as well as calculated ratios, such as HR/fly. The statistical package in the Annual carries this data a little further by providing run values for each batted ball type for each player. There is unfortunately little of interest on the issue of defence evaluation- disentangling the role of pitching and defence in run prevention remains an important and understudied topic.
Some of the best work in baseball research in 2006 concerned minor league baseball. The Hardball Times writers Jeff Sackmann (minorleaguesplits.com) and Chris Costancio (firstinning.com) are at the cutting edge of these efforts. The Annual contains an interesting and controversial top prospect list from Costancio, but none of the recent fascinating work from Sackmann. Hopefully, we will see more minor league material in the 2008 Annual.
All in all, I can offer a qualified recommendation for the Hardball Times Annual 2007. It's a book that contains some insight and entertaining writing, and is good value at $19.95. It can be ordered here.
The Bill James Handbook 2007 has less of interest to baseball fans in general, and perhaps more of interest to fantasy baseball aficionados. Much of the book is taken up with career statistic summaries, which are less helpful than one can find on baseballreference.com. Following the statistic summaries are player projections. The batting projections for 2007 are reasonable, but there is no reason to believe that these projections will be more accurate than several other projections that are available such as Baseball Prospectus' PECOTA. Career batting projections are provided, and frankly, they are headscratchers. They assume good health for many years, even in players in their late 30s and early 40s. The pitching projections are interesting, but unlikely to be reasonably accurate. It is very difficult, or perhaps impossible (as Bill James suggests in the book), to project pitchers.
The Handbook could be helpful as a reference tool for fantasy players, but for others, I would take a pass. It can be ordered here.
The Hardball Times Annual 2007 and the Bill James Handbook arrived at my home this month, and I opened them with the anticipation of someone 20 years younger. The Hardball Times website is a regular daily stopping point for me, for the fascinating statistics, thoughtful analysis and entertaining writing. And as for Bill James, how about saying that he is the pre-eminent baseball analyst of the last 30 years, and leaving it at that. I wish that I could recommend these books unreservedly, but that is impossible.
It is becoming harder and harder to write an annual with insights about major league baseball. The information that is freely available on the internet is astounding, courtesy of thehardballtimes.com, baseballprospectus.com, baseballreference.com, baseballanalysts.com, retrosheet.org, baseballmusings.com and many others. It still would be possible to distil much of the information that surrounds players and teams (as the old Bill James annual abstracts did) into a useful and interesting package, but neither of these books achieves that difficult goal.
Instead, both books have collections of material of varying interest and quality. The best material is purely original work. In the Hardball Times Annual, that would be John Walsh's historical study of outfield arms. Kill rates and hold rates are calculated for outfielders from the "retrosheet era", covering the careers and peers of Roberto Clemente, Jesse Barfield, and Vladimir Guerrero. In this case, the results were entirely expected for me, but it is still very helpful to see the data and may be of special interest for those who did not see Jesse Barfield. In the Bill James Handbook, the original work on 2006 player baserunning (advancement rates, outs on the bases, bases taken) was interesting and useful.
The Hardball Times Annual also contains a summaries of the 2006 season from the perspectives of each of the teams, and also of the post-season. The team summaries may be something that I will look back in 20 years, as I do the old Biil James annual abstracts, and find nuggets of gold, but for now, they seem to be a less thorough review of what I read every day on the internet. The same can be said of the post-season summary.
The Hardball Times statistical package on its website is probably the best available on the internet, for the breadth and helpful presentation of the "ball in play" information, breakdowns for pitchers and batters of batted ball type- ground ball, fly ball, and pop-up, as well as calculated ratios, such as HR/fly. The statistical package in the Annual carries this data a little further by providing run values for each batted ball type for each player. There is unfortunately little of interest on the issue of defence evaluation- disentangling the role of pitching and defence in run prevention remains an important and understudied topic.
Some of the best work in baseball research in 2006 concerned minor league baseball. The Hardball Times writers Jeff Sackmann (minorleaguesplits.com) and Chris Costancio (firstinning.com) are at the cutting edge of these efforts. The Annual contains an interesting and controversial top prospect list from Costancio, but none of the recent fascinating work from Sackmann. Hopefully, we will see more minor league material in the 2008 Annual.
All in all, I can offer a qualified recommendation for the Hardball Times Annual 2007. It's a book that contains some insight and entertaining writing, and is good value at $19.95. It can be ordered here.
The Bill James Handbook 2007 has less of interest to baseball fans in general, and perhaps more of interest to fantasy baseball aficionados. Much of the book is taken up with career statistic summaries, which are less helpful than one can find on baseballreference.com. Following the statistic summaries are player projections. The batting projections for 2007 are reasonable, but there is no reason to believe that these projections will be more accurate than several other projections that are available such as Baseball Prospectus' PECOTA. Career batting projections are provided, and frankly, they are headscratchers. They assume good health for many years, even in players in their late 30s and early 40s. The pitching projections are interesting, but unlikely to be reasonably accurate. It is very difficult, or perhaps impossible (as Bill James suggests in the book), to project pitchers.
The Handbook could be helpful as a reference tool for fantasy players, but for others, I would take a pass. It can be ordered here.
