Lindbergh, B. and Miller, S. (2017). The Only Rule Is It Has to Work: Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team

Lindbergh, B. and Miller, S. (2017). The Only Rule Is It Has to Work: Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team. 1st ed. New York: St. Martin's Griffin.

This is a gracious account of two nerdy statheads learning firsthand the difficulty of applying sabermeteric theory to real-life baseball.  Invited by a new owner to put their ideas where their mouths are, the 30-something writers for Baseball Prospectus join the Sonoma Stompers, a club in one of professional baseball’s lowest ranking leagues, and are given carte blanche to run whatever crazy experiments about which they have ever fantasized, including in this account the first deployment in professional baseball of a five-man infield. 

Unlike their fantasy baseball clubs, though, where they can move players around at will, the writers discover that in real life real people with real emotional lives often make implementing experiments difficult, if not sometimes impossible.  Bringing change to the clubhouse, to the dugout, and to the field is fraught with all the complications of making changes in the office. It’s not enough to have clever ideas about baseball.  To make effective change requires understanding how to manage human needs and desires, to be able to read and anticipate how the actors in the drama may react and finding ways to convince them that your cause is their cause.  (Another stathead author and professional psychologist (reviewed here), makes a guest appearance to offer advice on bonding.) As in any such projects, there are successes and failures.  The writers are brave enough not to gloss over their own mistakes nor to claim all the credit, which makes this a very refreshing read, a very real drama about learning and living graciously.  The writing is sharp and crisp, though I never could distinguish different authorial voices.  The writers take turns writing alternating chapters, but you’d never know it if they hadn’t said so.  Even so, this is one of the better baseball books I’ve read. Highly recommended. 

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Book review: Neyer, R. (2019). Power Ball: Anatomy of a Modern Baseball Game

Neyer, R. (2019). Power Ball: Anatomy of a Modern Baseball Game. 1st ed. New York: Harper.

Imagine listening to someone riff on whatever baseball-related topic comes to mind while watching a baseball game and you’ll have a good idea of what this book isn’t:  organized, thoughtful, insightful.  The conceit here is that the author will analyze a complete game from the 2017 season, with each chapter corresponding to one half-inning.  There is in fact little analysis about what’s happening on field.  The author instead finds a convenient hook on which to hang observations about a particular topic, such as the first plate appearance of Brian McCann, until 2017 the player who most consistently faced the shift.  This leads to a lengthy ramble about shifting that ends with no discernable conclusion, prediction, or recommendation.  Reading this book is a lot like listening to sports radio, including the smart-alecky tone, the inept efforts at humor, and the complete lack of referencing or building a reasoned argument.  Neyer claims, for example, that front office analysists are largely a dime-a-dozen, but offers no salary or budget figures, nor provides any data to suggest a lack of discernable differences in their output.  This is the first book I’ve read by Neyer.  Perhaps others are better.  I put this one down a third of the way through.  If the publisher and author can’t be bothered to spend time creating something organized and meaningful, I see no reason to spend time consuming it. 

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Book review: Carleton, R. (2018). The Shift: The Next Evolution in Baseball Thinking

Carleton, R. (2018). The Shift: The Next Evolution in Baseball Thinking. 1st ed. Chicago: Triumph Books LLC.

I’m neither a math geek nor a stathead and find extended discussions of statistics not especially engaging.  If you feel the same, then you might actually enjoy this book.

The author writes in an easy-to-follow conversational style and as an experienced educator (in psychology and statistics) knows how to break concepts into smaller pieces to aid comprehension. He is, in addition, a published baseball stathead, someone who has done authentic research, so he comes to the subject with some authority.  He’s not just Ed from Lakewood with an opinion about baseball.

Unfortunately, he appears to be one of those people who likes to discourse, and he spends quite an inordinate amount of space, perhaps as much as one third of the book, discussing his private life or relating overly long baseball anecdotes that are only loosely connected with his topics.  Some readers might like this as it provides a break from the discussions on statistics and probabilities.  I found it tedious and wasteful.

I don’t keep up with the latest in analytics research, but it seems most of the concepts Carleton discusses are nothing new.  I’ve heard broadcasters and read reporters discussing some of these ideas, and Carleton doesn’t present any as new findings. As such, his book provides a useful overview of research from the past two decades, but is not, as the title suggests, offering a revolutionary new approach to playing or managing baseball.