http://www.prweb.com/releases/2011/03/prweb5139404.htm

The Beauty of Short Hops: How Chance and Circumstance Confound the Moneyball Approach to Baseball

"The Beauty of Short Hops demonstrates that the Moneyball approach is doubly doomed. First, it fails on its own terms: it cannot make baseball a predictable game wholly understandable in numerical terms"

"The authors watched all 162 Red Sox games in 2009, and catalog the crazy events (such as a game turning on a ball striking a pigeon in the outfield) that enrich baseball and defeat the best-laid plans of sabermetricians."

It seems painfully aware that these authors completely missed the point of Moneyball and Sabermetrics in general. I almost want to read this to see how laughably wrong it is. Just the cover notes give me the vibe of guys sitting down with a vendetta against 'stat nerds'

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Team Cutler.

I have to make a run to Barnes and Noble today. Looks like a great book.

This book isn't going to rely on actual sales figures, instead it's going to focus on making itself dangerous for its amazon.com listing.

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Initially this is the main thing I find objectionable, if not laughable. This is not the point at all of statistical study of the game beyond "traditional" numbers. I thought the point of Moneyball was that a small market team looked at undervalued or nontraditional stats like OBP and tried to gain an advantage over teams with much greater resources. Whether one agrees with the Beane philosophy or not, I'm not sure it can be "debunked" without looking at numbers in a different way, and that is exactly the point of the sabrmetrics.

For the record, I am in no way saying that everything you need to learn about a player or team can be found on Baseball Reference.

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1926-1931-1934-1942-1944-1946-1964-1967-1982-2006-2011

Yeah, I'm not sure what the "best laid plans of sabermetricians" are. But I will say that people often work backward to support a conclusion they've already made.

I don't think there's anything wrong with Beane's philosophy. In fact, it's a very smart way to put together a team. But I also think people gave too much credit to those high-OBP/nothing else guys for the success of the A's when the real thing driving them was the combo of Mulder, Hudson, and Zito.

Moneyball is an interesting and fun read, but it also suggests that Chad Bradford is far greater than he actually is. It's funny how a book that seemingly promotes objective analysis is so subjective.

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

What they'll probably do is rely on their wacky anecdotes to prove a point. For instance, it may sell 10 thousand copies, but one of those copies that was sold was left in a first class airplane seat by a prior owner and it just so happened that the next person to board that plane noticed and picked it up. His name? Sal Bando. Take that, saberheads -- you couldn't have predicted that!

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"All crowds boycotting football games shouldn't care who sings or takes a knee because they aren't watching." - Nas