Playing the Percentages in Baseball
Written by three esteemed baseball statisticians, The Book continues where the legendary Bill James's Baseball Abstracts and Palmer and Thorn's The Hidden Game of Baseball left off more than twenty years ago. Tom Tango, Mitchel Lichtman, and Andrew Dolphin cover topics such as batting and pitching matchups, platooning, the benefits and risks of intentional walks and sacrifices, the legitimacy of alleged "clutch" hitters, and many of baseball's other theories on hitting, fielding, pitching, and even baserunning. They analyze when a strategy is a good idea and when it's a bad idea, and show how to more closely watch the "inside" game of baseball. If you want to know what the folks in baseball should be doing, find out in The Book.
"I can heartily recommend... The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball, by a trio of talented sabermatricians."
- Rob Neyer, author of The Neyer/James Guide to Pitchers
"It's the book I've always wanted to do."
- John Dewan, author of The Fielding Bible