Scouting and Scoring How We Know What We Know about Baseball
Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Christopher J. Phillips is associate professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the author of The New Math: A Political History. Twitter @cjphillips100Scouting and Scoring How We Know What We Know about Baseball
"Winner of a SABR Baseball Research Award, Society for American Baseball Research"
"Finalist for the CASEY Award for Best Baseball Book of the Year, Spitball Magazine"
An in-depth look at the intersection of judgment and statistics in baseball
Scouting and scoring are considered fundamentally different ways of ascertaining value in baseball. Scouting seems to rely on experience and intuition, scoring on performance metrics and statistics. In Scouting and Scoring, Christopher Phillips rejects these simplistic divisions. He shows how both scouts and scorers rely on numbers, bureaucracy, trust, and human labor to make sound judgments about the value of baseball players. Tracing baseballâs story from the nineteenth century to today, Phillips explains that the sport was one of the earliest fields to introduce numerical analysis, and new methods of data collection were supposed to enable teams to replace scouting with scoring. But thatâs not how things turned out. From the invention of official scorers and Statcast to the creation of the Major League Scouting Bureau, Scouting and Scoring reveals the inextricable connections between human expertise and data science, and offers an entirely fresh understanding of baseball.
"An enticing read for baseball data enthusiasts and, more broadly, those interested in thinking about notions such as âfactâ and âtruth,â how one measures the seemingly immeasurable, and attempts to quantify human potential."âRuss Goodman, MAA Reviews
"Provocative, thorough, and brilliant."âJohn Thorn, official historian of Major League Baseball
"Everyone interested in understanding modern baseball needs to read this book."âDave Smith, founder of Retrosheet
"Winner of a SABR Baseball Research Award, Society for American Baseball Research"
"Finalist for the CASEY Award for Best Baseball Book of the Year, Spitball Magazine"
An in-depth look at the intersection of judgment and statistics in baseball
Scouting and scoring are considered fundamentally different ways of ascertaining value in baseball. Scouting seems to rely on experience and intuition, scoring on performance metrics and statistics. In Scouting and Scoring, Christopher Phillips rejects these simplistic divisions. He shows how both scouts and scorers rely on numbers, bureaucracy, trust, and human labor to make sound judgments about the value of baseball players. Tracing baseballâs story from the nineteenth century to today, Phillips explains that the sport was one of the earliest fields to introduce numerical analysis, and new methods of data collection were supposed to enable teams to replace scouting with scoring. But thatâs not how things turned out. From the invention of official scorers and Statcast to the creation of the Major League Scouting Bureau, Scouting and Scoring reveals the inextricable connections between human expertise and data science, and offers an entirely fresh understanding of baseball.
"An enticing read for baseball data enthusiasts and, more broadly, those interested in thinking about notions such as âfactâ and âtruth,â how one measures the seemingly immeasurable, and attempts to quantify human potential."âRuss Goodman, MAA Reviews
"Provocative, thorough, and brilliant."âJohn Thorn, official historian of Major League Baseball
"Everyone interested in understanding modern baseball needs to read this book."âDave Smith, founder of Retrosheet