The Futility Infielder

At a recent Baseball Prospectus Bookstore gathering, Alex Belth recently helped me fight off a case of class clownism by showing me an advance copy of The Numbers Game: Baseball's Lifelong Fascination with Statistics by Alan Schwarz, who writes for ESPN, Baseball America and the New York Times. Two minutes of thumbing through it, I could barely bring myself to return the book.

Hotly anticipating its publication, I jumped through the necessary hoops to score a review copy, and I've had my nose buried in The Numbers Game since it arrived on Friday. Suffice it to say that if you have any interest in the history of baseball statistics, from the development of the box score to the onslaught of Internet-based live stat feeds and splits to the entry of performance analysis into front offices, this is a book for you. Take this as a fine companion to Moneyball.

My man Alex Belth recently published a superb interview he did with Schwarz last month. Here's an excerpt which captures some of the flavor of the exchange:

BB: How long have you had the idea to do a book?

AS: The idea for this project started about three years ago. Harvard Magazine asked me to profile a professor in their statistics department named Carl Morris. It's possible that your readers have since heard of him because he dabbled in baseball statistics. He had a lot of fun with baseball statistics and had lots of little ideas, and even big ideas about baseball statistics. So they thought it would be a fun profile. I went up and met professor Morris, up in Harvard Square. And I'm in a bagel shop, just talking with him about his ideas. And he told me about a method of looking at the game that I had never heard of. It's called the base-out matrix, where you look to see how many runs are scored in each of the twenty-four possible situations. There are three different out possibilities, zero, one or two outs. And then there are eight different configurations of bases empty, man on first, man on second, man on third, etc. So there are twenty-four different states. And if say, and this is off the top of my head, .57 runs are scored with a man on first and one out, and an average of .68 runs are scored with a man on second and two out, well then you know that the person who got a guy from first to second while making an out -- say getting the ground ball and moving him over from the right side, or whatever it may have been -- added on average .11 runs. It's just a way of looking at the Markovian states of the game. And I was like, "Wow, that's cool. I've never really looked at it that way." And professor Morris went out of his way to tell me that this was not his idea. This had been done for the first time by a man named George Lindsey in the 1950s. I had no idea anyone cared about this stuff back then. I had always thought that sabermetrics had begun pretty much with Bill James and computers. George Lindsey? Who is this George Lindsey guy? Well, I went and tried to read about this Lindsey person and his name wasn't anywhere. You couldn't find anything on George Lindsey. The more I talked with professor Morris, he gave me more names -- Earnshaw Cook was one -- the more I realized I didn't know anything about the history of baseball statistics -- before Bill James, I knew nothing. Given that I'm supposed to be a well-informed baseball guy, I wanted to read a book about this. There wasn’t any. So I had to write it. I wrote it because it didn't exist. And was happy to find that there was as much great material and history as I hoped there would be. It was absolutely amazing how deep and rich the history of people's obsession with statistics is. It's been a part of the game since Alexander Cartwright. It was very reassuring to know that the mania I share with so many has been descended from a long line of others. Lindsey wanted to know how often a guy scores from second base on a single, so you know what he did? He scored 1,700 games over ten years to figure it out. That's insane. It's wonderful, it's inspiring, it's disturbing, it's enlightening -- and it's worthy of a book.

Indeed it is, and I'll have a review of it sometime soon (I must admit I'm a bit surprised that Schwarz has never heard of a base-out matrix, but I'll save that for later). Alex also has an enjoyable, rambling interview with injury expert and author Will Carroll, discussing the long and winding road to his unique niche and the publication of his book, Saving the Pitcher. As the Beastie Boys say, "Ch-check it out!"