Title/Author:
“Hardball
Retrospective: Evaluating Scouting and Development Outcomes for the Modern-Era
Franchises” by Derek Bain
Tags:
Baseball, history,
draft, statistics
Publish date:
January 25, 2015
Length:
442 pages
Rating:
4 ½ of 5 stars (Excellent)
Review:
Speculation about
player trades and movement via free agency is always a popular topic of
conversation between baseball fans. Often they wonder how their favorite teams
would have done had they not traded away this player or if they had signed that
one instead of letting him leave as a free agent.
This book by Derek
Bain will help answer that question. He takes all thirty current major league
franchises and using advanced statistical analysis, he ranks each team by
evaluating players with their original teams.
He then takes these revised rosters and determines their standings each
season from 1901 to the present. It
makes for fascinating comparisons between the “original” team of a certain year
or era and the “actual” team.
This may sound
complicated, but once a reader actually studies the charts and analysis of his
or her team, it will begin to make sense.
It took me a little while to catch on while reading about the Athletics,
for example, but once I remembered that this analysis was done using players
who originally signed with the Athletics, not the actual rosters for that
season, then it began to make sense.
The statistical
analysis uses primarily the advanced statistics of Wins Above Replacement (WAR)
and Win-Shares for each player. This isn’t to say that the traditional
statistics that many baseball fans are familiar with such as batting average,
earned run average and runs batted in are not used. They are cited frequently
in the narrative for each team. However, they are not the final determination
for the rankings of each team – again, it is primarily WAR and Win-Shares.
One does not have to
be familiar with these statistics to get the total value of the book. As long as a reader can follow the charts and
narrative sections for the teams, then he or she will get the intended value of
the book. I do not consider myself to be fluent or knowledgeable on WAR or Win
Shares, but it was a lot of fun to see how my favorite team, the Minnesota
Twins, did with their “original” players over the years, including their time
as the Washington Senators. This book is
recommended for any baseball fan who is interested to see how his or her team
fared in finding talented players throughout the last century.
I wish to thank Mr. Bain for providing a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.
Book Format Read
E-book (PDF)
Buying links:
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