Percentage Baseball

Earnshaw Cook, Percentage Baseball. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966.

Percentage Baseball is a landmark in baseball writing: by applying the methods of statistical analysis and probability to the corpus of Major League statistics, Cook opened a new field to research. Bill James and all who have followed can only be thankful. However, like the Ypsilanti watertower, this landmark has certain obvious faults.

First among these is an over-reliance on statistical method. This would seem an odd complaint about a book of statistical analysis, but Cook's inability to connect the dots must be real if he consistently confuses a Phi Beta Kappa. Part of this may be his relegation of reams to appendixes, but part is also his frequent, seemingly arbitrary, substitution of values in his various equations
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As an arts major, though, one becomes accustomed to skipping over impenetrable equations. Cook asserts that his numbers work, and we choose to believe him. When he fails to apply their results consistently, however, he immediately loses credibility. His constant ranting against the sacrifice bunt, when compared to his charts of scoring probability for each base and out situation, lead one to question whether he has read his own material.

In spite of these faults, and in spite of reading more like a textbook than the usual baseball fare, Cook's opus is worth the time necessary to quickly skim the text. His ideas are revolutionary, if not all sound, and his passion is apparent even through the turgid prose of a mid-century academic. Even if the only benefit is to provide context for Philip Roth and Rob Neyer, Percentage Baseball is a book every baseball fan should know (if not fully understand).

Craig Robinson, Flip Flop Fly Ball. 2011, Bloomsbury USA, New York.


Flip Flop Fly Ball is the story of one man’s baseball fandom. Usually, that would not be very interesting (e.g. discovers baseball card trading in schoolyard: 1983. attends first MLB game, hometown team wins world series: 1984. chasing the dragon ever since). But Robinson isn’t a usual fan. An English artist, he first noticed baseball in 2000, upon moving to Germany. Robinson describes the experience in straightforward, enjoyable essays detailing his discovering the sport and his trip Stateside to experience it, including stops in Seattle and Toronto. The bulk of the book, however, is devoted to the infographics that first made Flip Flop Fly Ball an internet sensation.

Hailed as a “mat[ing of] Edward Tufte and Bill James" by Deadspin, Robinson’s twofold gift is asking interesting questions from an outside perspective and showing us their answers in simple, often brilliant, amusing graphical form. The cover, for instance, illustrates the percentage of baseball books (among Amazon’s top 100 results for the term on a given date) which have a baseball on the cover—by turning the pitcher’s mound into a pie chart.

And while Robinson is a Yankees fan, that comes across less as something to hate than as inevitable—he also counted, and charted, the number of different caps encountered in British and German towns during his travel from mid-2009 through 2010. The Yankees had 328. The Dodgers ran second—at 37. If a European is going to follow a team, exposure dictates it will be New York. Don’t hold it against him; be glad, instead, that he has discovered the game and given us this delightful book.

Jonah Keri, The Extra 2%. New York: Ballantine, 2011.

Neal Huntington, Chris Antonetti, and Dayton Moore can safely ignore this book. It will not tell them how to turn around their teams, no matter what the title says. In fact, The Extra 2% says almost nothing about the actual Wall Street analytic strategies employed by the Rays in their rise from worst to first; while the new management group responsible for the move has a financial, rather than baseball, background, that is their only significant difference from many other well-run franchises.

The most obvious comparable title is Michael Lewis's now-classic Moneyball, about the Oakland Athletics. That book is, in essence, a lesson in contrarian investing, or purchase of undervalued assets--in the A's case, on-base percentage--even though it is generally seen as an endorsement of advanced statistical analysis. The Extra 2%, on the other hand, has at its core a description of relentless arbitrage, or chruning assets in hopes of extracting surplus value from the transactions. This is especially apparent in the small-budget Rays's standard practice of trading star players for prospects as the stars become expensive: the Rays invest time in a player's development, enjoy his early years of price-controlled service, and begin again with another talented kid while someone else pays the big money for a star's decline phase.

Another baseball book, though? No, Keri, a former financial reporter who has also applied his analytic skills to baseball for numberous websites, ESPN and the Wall Street Journal, has instead written a primer on managing cultural change. Based on interviews with over 150 current and former Tampa players, past and current management, and other experts on baseball or economics, he provides a conversational, non-scholarly book which is easy to read and reinforces the notion that brains can, at least sometimes, be more important than money.