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Curve Ball: Baseball, Statistics, and the Role of Chance in the Game

Customer Reviews:

baseball statistics interpreted by professional statisticians

By Michael R. Chernick "statman31147" - January 23, 2008

Jim Albert and Jay Bennett share two traits that make them the perfect authors for this type of book (1) they are both baseball fans who know the game and have seen many games and much statistics from many angles and (2) they are both professional statisticians who understand probability and the subtle aspects that chance can have on statistics. By being professional statisticians they also know how sophisticated statistical techniques can add to ones ability to seriously address questions of strategy and comparison of player performance. That is what they accomplish in this book, teaching some basic probability and statistics along the way.
They also make it very interesting to the baseball fan by raising interesting baseball questions related to players that the fans relate to, namely the stars that the fans follow and the great clutch hits and clutch defensive plays that we baseball fans have imprinted in our memories, like Mazeroski's game winning home run in the 1960 World... read more

Disappointing

By Mark - September 25, 2001

This is a book that I was excited to buy but unfortunately I did not enjoy it as much as I had hoped for. The two main reasons for this are 1) the lack of major insights and 2) the huge quantity of typos (I stopped counting after around 20). The copy editor for this did an absolutely terrible job, I'm afraid to report (writing this guarantees a typo somewhere in my review :) ). Some of the players' names are spelled incorrectly, and some of the numbers in the charts are inconsistent. This is very distracting. The book is divided into 12 chapters, starting with a fairly trivial look at tabletop baseball games. The authors devote much attention to evaluating offensive performance, comparing various measures such as batting average, SLG, OBP, linear weights, total average, runs created and a few other more obscure ones. There is also some discussion of clutch hitting and a look at "Did the best team win the World Series?"One of the other problems I found was that... read more

Good, but could be better

By Darren Glass - April 24, 2002

I'm not sure who the target audience for this book is. At the beginning the introduce the most basic of statistics concepts as well as the most basic of baseball concepts. And at the end they seem to assume lots of knowledge of statistics. As both a baseball fan and a mathematician, I felt the beginning of the book very slow, but I also worry that someone who isn't knowledgable in both already might have trouble following some of it.That said, the book was very well written, and posed some interesting ideas and questions. I wish it had been longer, as the last few chapters were really getting me into sabermetrics!

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