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Good book, but a bit "weedsy." You will not enjoy it if you don't really, really like baseball.
Really interesting history of scouting and scoring and trying to put the stories together in the context of how data is created. However, and this may be my sabermetric bias I found his argument about how scouts are creating data artifacts is comparable to the process of scoring and the creation of advanced metrics to be wanting.
The author has researched and presents the history of the work done by baseball scorers that documents each game forming the basis of the many statistical measures of baseball performance along with the work of baseball scouts who support decision making on who does (and doesn't) become a major league baseball player. He assumes most people believe that the first is a fairly objective process while the second is more subjective, but since both are mediated by individuals, he suggests this isn't accurate.
Much of his inspiration is associated with the Moneyball philosophy that baseball (and everything else) can be quantified for decision making rather than relying on personal impressions and opinions. Big data will make everything better, and at a lower cost and more efficiently. In a somewhat polemical approach to this, historian Phillips documents his disagreement with much of this kind of thinking.
I was looking for of an understanding of the history of official scoring in baseball rather than anything else, and this worked for that more or less. I was less interested in the second part of the book that looks mostly at scouting. It seemed repetitive in what it had to say, somehow.
The book is around 250 pages of text but there is also about 30 pages of detailed notes that I think should have been footnotes rather than at the end. Some of the more interesting statements are in the notes, I thought. I only realized they were there as I approached the end of the book, and paged through them scanning for interesting stuff after finishing the rest of it.
The author chose a single player, Craig Biggio, who played for the Houston Astros and other teams, as his main continuing example of how players were assessed in different ways. He seems like a good choice to make certain points but for a baseball book, I think a surprisingly small number of players are discussed here. That may be a good thing. Not sure.
Much of his inspiration is associated with the Moneyball philosophy that baseball (and everything else) can be quantified for decision making rather than relying on personal impressions and opinions. Big data will make everything better, and at a lower cost and more efficiently. In a somewhat polemical approach to this, historian Phillips documents his disagreement with much of this kind of thinking.
I was looking for of an understanding of the history of official scoring in baseball rather than anything else, and this worked for that more or less. I was less interested in the second part of the book that looks mostly at scouting. It seemed repetitive in what it had to say, somehow.
The book is around 250 pages of text but there is also about 30 pages of detailed notes that I think should have been footnotes rather than at the end. Some of the more interesting statements are in the notes, I thought. I only realized they were there as I approached the end of the book, and paged through them scanning for interesting stuff after finishing the rest of it.
The author chose a single player, Craig Biggio, who played for the Houston Astros and other teams, as his main continuing example of how players were assessed in different ways. He seems like a good choice to make certain points but for a baseball book, I think a surprisingly small number of players are discussed here. That may be a good thing. Not sure.