Two books that I am looking to buy are Baseball Forecaster by Ron Shandler, and The Bill James Handbook 2005. Not aware of many other credible sources....
The book deals with the role of chance in the game. Winner of the 2001 SABR Baseball Research Award, an award given to the best baseball research publications in general, not just covering the field of statistics, but history, biography, and otherwise.
The book can be fairly heavy at times, but fortunately it also serves as a good introduction to statistics and probability. The book starts off using the early table-top baseball games like Strat-o-matic to describe simple models and expands throughout the following chapters. Nonetheless, I couldn't put it down.
Albert and Bennett also wrote a textbook that uses baseball to teach high school students about statistics.
I just bought my first-ever Baseball Forecaster, and I have to say, I'm very impressed. The pithy player capsules breaking down peripherals, trends and outlook in a few sentences for stars and scrubs alike are pretty interesting. Shandler's good too on the vagaries of forecasting. And they have minor league MLE's, too.
Whereas some of the roto value and draft lists near the end look like they were slapped together by an intern. And they push LIMA/RIMA, on which I'm not entirely sold, at least the way they sell it. I mean, OCab is a LIMA guy but Blalock is not? Who knew?
James had an interesting article on team inefficiency at translating run differentials into wins, as personified by modern-era Red Sox squads. James ended up redoing his runs-created formula this year, I guess, but that only eliminated part of the apparent inefficiency. Then Shandler came, and I started reading that.
[edited for clarity]
Last edited by Scott Boras Client on Tue Jan 04, 2005 9:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Thorn and Palmer's Total Baseball is still the end all and be all of the yearly books IMO. Stats upon stats along with excellent ariticles on a wide range of baseball topics.
Baseball Prospectus 2005 should be out pretty soon and is a cheaper alternative and is much more individual analysis focused. I enjoyed reading the last few copies even though there are a few points I disagree on.
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by xeifrank » Tue Jan 04, 2005 9:13 pm 
