In ballparks and on message boards, in bars and by the water cooler, great baseball debates rage. Who’s the best player of all time? Why’d they pay that guy so much money? What’s the deal with steroids, anyway? Fans are divided among thirty different teams, but they all seem to love a good argument.
The people charged with resolving these debates have plenty of opinions to share—and plenty of decibels with which to share them. Too often, however, those opinions don’t get you closer to the truth. The ex-jock who raves about a player’s character often ignores that same player’s complete inability to help his team on the field. Yet for years, we fans lapped up everything the ex-jock said. After all, he’d played the game. His experience hanging in the clubhouse, taking the field in front of fifty thousand fans and standing in against a 95-mph fastball, must have given him knowledge others didn’t have.
That’s all changed. The last few decades have brought about a revolution for baseball fans. A great equalizer has emerged that has put everyone on an even footing. It turns out you don’t need to stare a batter down from the pitcher’s mound or take him out on a slide into second to know if he can play. If you know how to think properly about the statistical side of baseball, you can have insights that elude even some professionals. Learning to use numbers in a productive way has opened the door for a new generation of informed fans, a group that doesn’t require insider knowledge to get the goods on their favorite team.
The use of numbers in the game dates back more than a century—to Henry Chadwick, a baseball enthusiast who produced the first box scores in the nineteenth century. Chadwick’s record-keeping stoked a growing interest in numbers that would eventually spread to baseball operators. When Branch Rickey rose to the equivalent of today’s general manager role with the 1920s St. Louis Cardinals, he brought with him a strong understanding of the role of numbers in team building.
After the 1942 season, Rickey took over as GM of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Seeking help with number crunching to gain a competitive edge, Rickey turned to Allan Roth. In his years working under Rickey, Roth uncovered a wealth of new information. Suddenly the Dodgers could look at a player’s batting average in every count, or weigh his performance against left- and right-handed pitchers. Roth may have been the first of his kind, a team statistician charged with both compiling and analyzing numbers. When the Dodgers enjoyed the most successful era in their history, it seemed as if more Roths would soon spring up everywhere. But the influence of numerical analysis on the game remained minimal. Though researchers like Earnshaw Cook worked to advance baseball research into new areas, it remained the province of outsiders, with fans and teams both slow to accept the benefits of applied numbers.
It took Bill James and his series of Baseball Abstract books in the 1970s and ’80s to pull numbers into the limelight. James advocated the use of “sabermetrics” (a take-off on the Society of American Baseball Research, or SABR) as a way of learning more about the game. His sharp writing style, combined with recent discoveries of how the game worked, created a new generation of curious, knowledgeable fans. The revolution spread rapidly from there. The Hidden Game of Baseball by John Thorn and Pete Palmer and The Diamond Appraised by Craig Wright and Tom House were seminal books that tackled new sabermetric ideas and analyzed some older ones in greater detail.
In 1996, Baseball Prospectus grabbed the baton. Much like James, Baseball Prospectus began as a group of young, inquisitive fans with no particular connections, armed only with brainpower and writing skill. The growth of the group over the years, combined with the explosion in database capabilities and the Internet, has helped us become a leader in the field, with some of the most powerful analytic tools in the business. At the same time, we recognize our place within the much larger revolution. Today there’s a whole new way of thinking about baseball that extends from the bleachers to every major league front office.
All of which leads us to this book. Within these pages the authors pose twenty-nine provocative questions, meant to stir up those debates we love so much. But the answers to those questions aren’t the main goal of this book. In a sense, we don’t really care whether Barry Bonds is a better player than Babe Ruth. More important than the particular answers is how we arrived at them. When we ask, “Is Barry Bonds Better Than Babe Ruth?” we must figure out the best way to evaluate one player versus another. It’s not enough to say, “I saw Barry Bonds play at SBC Park. He hit a ball so hard, it sank one of those boats in McCovey Cove. He’s awesome!” Well, Bonds has indeed enjoyed an awesome career. And the condition of some of those dinghies in McCovey Cove is pretty suspect.
But to arrive at an answer that expands our knowledge of the game, we need to ask the right smaller questions within the framework of the bigger question. How much credit should Bonds get for his base-stealing? How did the ballparks each man played in affect his production? How do we account for Ruth playing in a vastly different era, before the huge advances made in medical technology and training regimens, and before integration? We use numbers as a framework to delve into these answers. But it’s the process of learning to think critically about the game that defines this book, and in a broader sense defines our experiences as avid fans of the game. It’s the baseball between the numbers that we seek.
We put this book together because we love baseball, and we want to see it grow and succeed. That we approach the game with an analytical eye and a critical keyboard doesn’t diminish the joy we’ve derived from baseball—it enhances it. Reading Baseball Between the Numbers will make you a smarter fan of the game, able to look at any bunt situation, any pitching change or 3-run homer, and understand its implications. But it will also heighten your enjoyment of the game. The next time you’re at the park arguing a manager’s decision, you’ll be well armed for the debate. Better yet, you’ll have a lot more fun.
—Jonah Keri
Seattle, Washington