by J.C. Bradbury
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Product Description
Freakonomics meets Moneyball in this provocative exposé of baseball’s most fiercely debated controversies and some of its oldest, most dearly held myths
Providing far more than a mere collection of numbers, economics professor and popular blogger J.C. Bradbury, shines the light of his economic thinking on baseball, exposing the power of tradeoffs, competition, and incentives. Utilizing his own “sabernomic” approach, Bradbury dissects baseball topics such as:
• Did steroids have nothing to do with the recent homerun records? Incredibly, Bradbury’s research reveals steroids probably had little impact.
• Which players are ridiculously overvalued? Bradbury lists all players by team with their revenue value to the team listed in dollars—including a dishonor role of those players with negative values—updated in paperback to include the 2007 season.
• Does it help to lobby for balls and strikes?
Statistics alone aren’t enough anymore. This is a refreshing, lucid, and powerful read for fans, fantasy buffs, and players—as well as coaches at all levels—who want to know what is really happening on the field.
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
 The Baseball Economist, 2008-09-30
The most boring baseball book I've ever read. As hasrd as I tried, I could not get to the 3rd chapter, and retained nothing from the first two.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Brilliant, Thought-Provoking Book, 2008-08-29
This book gives unique insight into popular baseball issues such as the big-city-versus-small-city economic disparity problem we face today, the argument against having left-handed catchers (which we discover isn't too convincing), and deciding how much a ball player is worth using economic theory. Geeky stuff, but a fascinating read.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Some great stat analysis, 2008-08-16
I found this book worth reading overall, with a few flaws. The author shines on the sections that are more pure statistical analysis to argue a particular point about the multifaceted game of baseball. The chapter on left handed catchers is a good one, as well as the section on how we judge hitters and pitchers' stats. In addition, though he is a college professor, he makes the statistical analysis reasonably accessible to the general public, and some sections could easily be used as interesting supplemental reading in microeconomics first year courses (especially if your audience are 19 year olds who would rather be hitting college balls then sitting in your course). The book weakens when he wanders into more policy territory (a la Freakonomics, the current trendy thing to do), as he tends to argue points by basically stating the data doesn't prove anything. The chapter on steroid use is a prime example. He also at times risks turning baseball into a pure commodity, rather than seeing the entertainment angle - what can one expect from a guy who has no problem with having advertisements on the baselines. Nonetheless, I found this book to be generally well-researched and thought-provoking.
As a final note, he quotes heavily from the book Moneyball, and I would recommend reading that book first before this one. (I did not)
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Economics only partly explains human behavior, 2008-07-20
This book is good at raising interesting questions and providing an analytical viewpoint. It suffers from the two main limitations of classical economics.
First, any analysis of a complex system with many interdependent variables requires making many assumptions. There is simply not enough data to control for everything. The author gets credit for effort, but almost every conclusion he draws could be seriously argued the other way.
Second, humans are not purely economic creatures. Sure, we respond to incentives, but we also behave irrationally. We get emotionally attached to teams and players, we live by superstitions, we are convinced that Brand X is better simply because we saw more ads for it. This book's old-style economic vantage point is ripe for challenge. Every conclusion here deserves a huge chunk of salt.
I am especially troubled about the author's treating of baseball like a physical commodity. Baseball is not a widget, it is entertainment. A more modern treatment would compare baseball to the music business or the movies, where network effects, brand, costless replication, venue, and fashion are the main drivers, not old-fashioned supply and demand for a limited product. There's another, better, book waiting to be written here by some other author whose specialty is the economics of modern media.
The book could be written better. In several places the logical introduction of ideas is misarranged, and in others the dryness parches the throat. Still, if you like baseball and your team has got lame announcers like most do, this book is worth a read. (If you live in San Francisco with the best play-by-play and color announcers in the business, then might as well save this book for the off-season.)
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
"One More Groundball with Eyes": Economics, Sabermetrics and the National Pastime , 2008-04-15
On Sunday, Dustin Pedroia made a dumb base running decision on the ball he hit off the Monster at Fenway Park, stopping after he rounded first then continuing on to second. The Red Sox had one out and nobody on, but according to sabermetrics, it was a good at-bat as his on-base percentage went up! Economist and baseball fan, J.C. Bradbury has produced a good enjoyable book using sabermetrics and microeconomics. His look into the on-field probabilities, general managerial decisions and the economics of the league are not without problems but are intriguing and at times enlightening.
As a baseball fan, part one - "On The Field" - interested me the most. He opens the book looking into the difference of Hit Batsmen between the American and National Leagues. The varying rules regarding the DH allow him to use the law of demand and the ideas of opportunity costs, which should interest an economist in baseball and a baseball fan in economics as a tool for understanding more than money. His theories into the dearth of left-handed catchers are good: Bradbury feels that the demand for pitchers with good arms means that lefties are more likely at a young age to be pushed that way then to the tools of ignorance. However, he doesn't look into what I always thought was the greatest hindrance to lefty catchers, most batters are right handed, and therefore the throw to second is generally that much more difficult. I would like to see somebody compare SB percentages when there is a lefty at bat, before I become unconvinced of it.
As an economist, I am most interested in part four - "What Field?" - where Bradbury looks into the economics of baseball teams, tickets, etc. He looks to the theory of monopoly and competition to show the optimal prices of tickets, teams in the leagues and games played in a season. For ticket prices, he shows a great example of discriminatory pricing between teams, rather than the more obvious between seats. How can baseball as a whole discriminate in prices between Kansas City's $18 a seat average and Boston's $44? Despite the obvious, I'd never pay $44 to see the Royals; Bradbury also shows that any monopoly with a grasp of its buyers is able to do this and that baseball is an example of economics in general.
Where he gets off track is the same old problem many baseball fans have with sabermetrics in general. The first is his look at the on-deck hitter. He tries to show that, in aggregates, the talent of the on-deck hitter does affect the pitches thrown to the batter. How does he make these decisions? You know, On Base Percentage! Yet, I have just two great examples of the fallacy of this. How many times was Roger Maris intentionally walked in 1961, when he hit 61 home runs? The answer is zero, because Mickey Mantle was batting behind him. The second example is a game I saw in 2001 involving the Red Sox. The Sox take out Carl "Dinosaurs Didn't Exist" Everett for Darren Lewis, as a defensive replacement in the seventh - .250 career hitter Darren Lewis. When the other team tied the game, between the 8th and 18th they intentionally walked Manny Ramirez four times, because Darren Lewis would just ground into a double play on the next at-bat, and the Sox couldn't score. Yet, this would not be shown in his look at the stats, because Manny's OBP and OPS actually went up in the game! Surely had the other team had been able to score to win the game, part of it was because Everett wasn't batting behind Manny.
Here's the other problem OBP versus the ability to hit in the clutch. Bradbury says: "The problem is that hitting with RISP [runners in scoring position] is not a skill, or at least not much of one we can identify, but a statistical anomaly" (155). Further he argues: "If a hitting with RISP is something a hitter can purposely alter, I have a hard time believing he is holding something back in non-RISP situations" (156). I have two arguments against this idea. First, Pat Tabler, in his 12-year career Tabler hit .282 for his career. But, with the bases loaded he hit 43 for 88 (.488). Surely, over 88 at-bats there must be some sort of edge. My second argument is David Ortiz!
Turning to pitchers, the road is even murkier. He looks to defensive independent pitching stats ERA, whereby if one looks not to a pitcher's ERA but to how he does when ball are out of play - walks, strikeouts and homeruns - we get a better metric of how good a pitcher is because he could have a good or terrible defense behind him. This is all well and good, but I've watched Pedro Martinez and Greg Maddux enough to know that there are some pitchers that when push comes to shove make better pitches in pressure situations. Strangely enough, these statisticians find the best pitchers who have the best ERAs have the best ERAs when the ball does not go into play. So?
Then there is the look at general managers. Specifically he looks to Bill Beane and his Oakland A's "Moneyball." Bradbury shows that Beane, using sabermetrics and undervalued players was able to field a team that made it to the playoffs four of the six times between 2000 and 2005 with a payroll one third of the league average. While this is impressive, the A's won 8 playoff games in that six year run. To win the World Series you must win 11 playoff games in one year. Apparently good GMs can take your teams to the playoffs, but then its just luck? Or, is it that you need more than aggregates when you get there?
If one were to extrapolate from the ideas of no clutch hitting, wouldn't there be no clutch pitching? Yet, Bradbury accepts that there are pitchers who are better at certain situations. Otherwise I would have tried to make Mariano Rivera a starter so he could pitch more of his team's innings, right? Despite some of its misplaced assumptions, I find that the book is an easy read. Although Bradbury would have been better placed on page 137 to quote Crash Davis from Bull Durham:
"You know what the difference is between hitting .250 and hitting .300? 1 got it figured out. Twenty-five hits a year in 500 at bats is 50 points. Okay? There's 6 months in a season, that's about 25 weeks - you get one extra flare a week - just one - a gork, a ground ball with eyes, a dying quail - just one more dying quail a week and you're in Yankee Stadium!"
than his own similar description of the same statistical phenomenon. Still I think this book is a must for any baseball fan after the Baseball Abstract and the Baseball Encyclopedia. Additionally for anyone teaching an intro to economics or intermediate micro class I would assign some of the chapters as "optional reading" for sports fans. The monopoly and hit batsmen sections could really bring these things into greater clarity. Overall: 3 ½ stars.
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