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The Numbers Game

The Numbers Game

Baseball's Lifelong Fascination with Statistics

by Alan Schwarz
Hardback
Publication Date: 21/07/2004

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Most baseball fans, players and even team executives assume that the National Pastime's infatuation with statistics is simply a byproduct of the information age, a phenomenon that blossomed only after the arrival of Bill James and computers in the 1980s. They couldn't be more wrong.

In this unprecedented new book, Alan Schwarz - whom bestselling Moneyball author Michael Lewis calls "one of today's best baseball journalists" - provides the first-ever history of baseball statistics, showing how baseball and its numbers have been inseparable ever since the pastime's birth in 1845. He tells the history of this obsession through the lives of the people who felt it most: Henry Chadwick, the 19th-century writer who invented the first box score and harped endlessly about which statistics mattered and which did not; Allan Roth, Branch Rickey's right-hand numbers man with the late-1940s Brooklyn Dodgers; Earnshaw Cook, a scientist and Manhattan Project veteran who retired to pursue inventing the perfect baseball statistic; John Dewan, a former Strat-O-Matic maven who built STATS Inc. into a multimillion-dollar powerhouse for statistics over the Internet; and dozens more.

Almost every baseball fan for 150 years has been drawn to the game by its statistics, whether through newspaper box scores, the backs of Topps baseball cards, The Baseball Encyclopedia, or fantasy leagues. Today's most ardent stat scientists, known as "sabermetricians," spend hundreds of hours coming up with new ways to capture the game in numbers, and engage in holy wars over which statistics are best. Some of these men - and women -- are even being hired by major league teams to bring an understanding of statistics to a sport that for so long shunned it.

Taken together, Schwarz paints a history not just of baseball statistics, but of the soul of the sport itself. The Numbers Game will be an invaluable part of any fan's library and go down as one of the sport's classic books.
ISBN:
9780312322229
9780312322229
Category:
Baseball
Format:
Hardback
Publication Date:
21-07-2004
Language:
English
Publisher:
St. Martin's Press
Country of origin:
United States
Dimensions (mm):
243.84x161.54x28.32mm
Weight:
0.54kg
Alan Schwarz

Alan Schwarz is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated correspondent at The New York Times. He has won many major journalism awards, including the Polk Award, the Associated Press award for project reporting (three times) and the 2013 Excellence in Statistical Reporting Award from the American Statistical Association. Schwarz earned a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics, cum laude, from the University of Pennsylvania in 1990.

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