THE NUMBERS GAME
by Alan Schwarz
Who's the Best?
I have a coworker who is, at
best, a casual baseball fan. As Philadelphians do, he complains about the
Phillies, and regularly asks me questions like, “What’s wrong? What happened? Do
they just stink?”.
It has become a secret belief of mine that long suffering fans, like
Philadelphia fans of all four major sports or Red Sox fans, don’t want to hear
reasons for their failures. To think that your loss is just that, a loss,
subject to whims of fancy and pulled hamstrings, is disheartening-one wants
sports to be less capricious than life. Better to believe that “they” are out to
get you, that there’s a curse based on a goat(Cubs) or a dead player(Red Sox) or
a colonial American’s statue (Phillies) than to realize that it just wasn’t your
time. Studying numbers is another way of hiding from the supernatural and
explaining your team’s failure. When you can look at the numbers and realize
that the 2004 Phillies replaced too many Kevin Millwood and Vincente Padilla
starts with Cory Lidle and Paul Abbott starts, you see that whether or not
William Penn’s statue is the highest building in Philadelphia doesn’t matter. If
you don’t have enough pitching, you don’t have enough wins and you don’t win the
World Series. It’s harsh, but it’s the truth.
Numbers are said to be the backbone of baseball, and the study, love and, yes,
passion for numbers make up the new book by Baseball America’s Alan Schwarz, The
Numbers Game. Schwarz’ book is remarkable, and after seeing it recommended by
Baseball Think Factory patrons, Baseball Prospectus authors, and SABR members,
it proves to be a quick, enjoyable, and lovely tour through the number crunchers
that have followed swiftly, pencil and scorecard in hand, whenever bat met ball.
The true measure of TNG‘s greatness is the reader is left slightly sad when
finally closing the cover, wishing only for more stories, more detail, and more
anecdotes.
Schwarz begins at the appropriate point, the very beginning of the game’s
history, with Henry Chadwick and the game’s origin in the gloveless, double
digit scoring, underhand pitching of the 1850s. Naturally, Schwarz follows the
thread of the game and the expanding universe of errors, home runs, and batting
averages through all of baseball history until the present, with a gruesome
exegesis of Grady Little, Pedro Martinez, and the 2003 ALCS Game 7 meltdown.
Names like Earl Weaver and Branch Rickey, common to any history of baseball,
stand side by side with relative unknowns like Allan Roth and Earnshaw Cook in
this tale as each era is brought to life through the men who tried to understand
the game through the numbers.
It is truly remarkable to the modern reader to learn that military officers and
neckwear salesmen were churning through homemade scoresheets and generating some
of the same conclusions decades before SABR members and other baseball thinkers
would unearth them. The weight of orthodoxy, and the power of truth to overcome
it, runs through the pages of TNG as the same questions are asked and answered.
Steal or wait for another hit? Walk the slugger or pitch to him? Bunt or not? It
is also somewhat surprising to learn of the huge role tabletop baseball has
played during more modern times as many current baseball personages admit to
boyhood rolling of dice and scratching on scoresheets.
Perhaps the greatest enjoyment from the pages of TNG is the feeling that one
gets when attending a SABR conference or stumbling across a Baseball
Prospectus-the feeling that you are not alone. When night watchman Bill James
self published his first Baseball Abstract, he says he calculated that, based on
the people he had spoken to about it and extrapolating, that there simply had to
be people who thought like he did. People who thought that it mattered whether
or not Ty Cobb hit better at home, or whether or not Whitey Ford was a big game
pitcher. It mattered whether or not the 1961 Yankees were a great team. And it
mattered to prove these things as nearly as one could, not merely accept the
word of grizzled ballplayers who say it’s so. And he learned that there were
others -his small publication grew and truly started the modern field of
sabermetrics.
Reading TNG, we learn that not only are there others, there always were those
who not only see the beauty of a curve catching the outside corner for strike
three, but those who recorded the curve in a book. Then they took the book,
added the K to the thousands of others for the pitcher, the teams, the hitter,
and the season. And then these others took the book, added it to the other books
for the other teams and leagues and seasons and careers and decades and began to
ask the questions that make the game an obsession for millions-what do we know?
What can we prove? Who’s the best? --Michael Webb