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Extra Innings: More Baseball Between the Numbers from the Team at Baseball Prospectus
In 1996, a brassy young team of fans produced a guide to baseball statistics. Printed on a photocopier, its distribution, which was in the low hundreds, was limited to friends, family, and die-hard stat heads. Sixteen years later, the Baseball Prospectus annual regularly hits best-seller lists and has become an indispensable guide for the serious fan.
In Extra Innings, the team at Baseball Prospectus integrates statistics, interviews, and analysis to deliver twenty arguments about today’s game. In the tradition of their seminal book, Baseball Between the Numbers, they take on everything from steroids to the amateur draft. They probe the impact of managers on the game. They explain the critical art of building a bullpen. In an era when statistics matter more than ever, Extra Innings is an essential volume for every baseball fan.
In Extra Innings, the team at Baseball Prospectus integrates statistics, interviews, and analysis to deliver twenty arguments about today’s game. In the tradition of their seminal book, Baseball Between the Numbers, they take on everything from steroids to the amateur draft. They probe the impact of managers on the game. They explain the critical art of building a bullpen. In an era when statistics matter more than ever, Extra Innings is an essential volume for every baseball fan.
- GenresBaseballSportsNonfiction
446 pages, Hardcover
First published February 28, 2012
20 people are currently reading
275 people want to read
About the author
Baseball Prospectus
139 books15 followersBaseball Prospectus is an organization that publishes a website, BaseballProspectus.com, devoted to the sabermetric analysis of baseball. BP has a staff of regular columnists and provides advanced statistics as well as player and team performance projections on the site.
Since 1996 the BP staff has also published a Baseball Prospectus annual as well as several other books devoted to baseball analysis and history.
Since 1996 the BP staff has also published a Baseball Prospectus annual as well as several other books devoted to baseball analysis and history.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 31 reviews
April 16, 2012
Despite being tedious at points and typo-ridden, Extra Innings was ultimately extremely insightful. It may not have hit a home run, but it was a nice piece of basehitting.
November 17, 2023
An interesting enough book filled with essays ranging from questioning the true impact of the steroid era, questions of pitching and hitting, and assessments of managers and GMs. While I found some of the essays interesting and shined a light on some things I'd never considered, the others were a bit of a bore with statistics out the wazoo (not against it as I enjoy statistics), but not conveyed in a very compelling way. Overall, I feel like I still kind of come away with more questions than answers. Also in desperate need of an editor.
October 25, 2019
3.5 stars rounded up. It's somewhat outdated now with innumerable frustrating typos, and poorer uses of illustrative examples than Baseball Between the Numbers, but I definitely learned something.
June 20, 2012
With teams, particularly those working under smaller budgets, seeking any advantage, organizations have embraced non-traditional statistics as a means to identify new approaches in the post-Moneyball world. This, of course, makes the folks at Baseball Prospectus happy, because if there’s anything they love more than a new stat, it’s asking thought-provoking questions that force people to rethink long-held beliefs about what works and what doesn’t.
The overall theme of this book is how best to construct a winning team. Topics include such puzzlers as is a good fielder worth as much as a good hitter, what’s the best way to build a bullpen, and why are strikeouts so prevalent today (and how do they affect the game).
Some of the highlights: Jay Jaffe's chapters on the steroid era and how Hall of Fame should approach "tainted" players; the case for and against Jack Morris making Cooperstown; Jason Parks's breakdown of tools and how scouts look at prospects; Rany Jazayerli's chapter on how younger high school position players (17 vs 18) are undervalued in the MLB draft; and the chapters on building and deploying a bullpen.
There were a couple of chapters that didn't do a lot for me, particularly the ones on evaluating general managers and managers (two separate chapters) and the one examining whether Stephen Strasburg's injury could have been prevented. (The answer, "yes and no," which made me feel like that chapter was a waste of both space and reading time.)
Overall, this is a satisfying release, with much of it coming from a different angle than you might be accustomed to given the heavy dependence in most sabermetric resources on statistics and formulas. Certainly they are here aplenty, but they play more of a supporting role, as tools to build cases and back up arguments.
The overall theme of this book is how best to construct a winning team. Topics include such puzzlers as is a good fielder worth as much as a good hitter, what’s the best way to build a bullpen, and why are strikeouts so prevalent today (and how do they affect the game).
Some of the highlights: Jay Jaffe's chapters on the steroid era and how Hall of Fame should approach "tainted" players; the case for and against Jack Morris making Cooperstown; Jason Parks's breakdown of tools and how scouts look at prospects; Rany Jazayerli's chapter on how younger high school position players (17 vs 18) are undervalued in the MLB draft; and the chapters on building and deploying a bullpen.
There were a couple of chapters that didn't do a lot for me, particularly the ones on evaluating general managers and managers (two separate chapters) and the one examining whether Stephen Strasburg's injury could have been prevented. (The answer, "yes and no," which made me feel like that chapter was a waste of both space and reading time.)
Overall, this is a satisfying release, with much of it coming from a different angle than you might be accustomed to given the heavy dependence in most sabermetric resources on statistics and formulas. Certainly they are here aplenty, but they play more of a supporting role, as tools to build cases and back up arguments.
April 30, 2015
Anything by the Baseball Prospectus team is worth reading, but I didn't enjoy this anywhere close to as much as I enjoyed their previous offering, Baseball Between the Numbers: Why Everything You Know About the Game is Wrong. What I expected in this book was more detailed statistical analysis, but instead, this had much less. The questions they posit are interesting and the discussion is worth reading, but it was not nearly as enjoyable as Baseball Between the Numbers. The book is broken into six parts: one about steroids and performance enhancement, one about team-building, one about pitching, one about fielding, one about hitting, and a conclusion. The chapter about Latin American scouting was a bit drawn out in my opinion; it really didn't have anything that appeals to people looking for a sabermetric approach to baseball. I enjoyed their discussion about the Hall of Fame, as this type of discussion always fascinates me.
I believe that Baseball Prospectus was attempting to reach a wider audience with this book. They definitely threw some bones to the "traditional" baseball crowd with some of these chapters, which leads me to believe that this was their ultimate motive.
This is worth reading, but if choosing between the two, read Baseball Between the Numbers.
I believe that Baseball Prospectus was attempting to reach a wider audience with this book. They definitely threw some bones to the "traditional" baseball crowd with some of these chapters, which leads me to believe that this was their ultimate motive.
This is worth reading, but if choosing between the two, read Baseball Between the Numbers.
July 15, 2013
I didn't like this as much as Baseball Prospectus' previous book, Baseball Between The Numbers. There is still quite a bit of math in this book, and in a few cases math that I would need to freshen up on to fully understand the equations used. However, this book seems to be trying to appeal to a larger audience. As such, much of the math is explained away or added as an afterthought. This is unfortunate. I'm currently reading ex-Baseball Prospectus employee Nate Silver's book The Signal and the Noise. He does an excellent job of playing to the math geeks and the causal readers, but of course not everyone can be Nate Silver.
November 5, 2021
A mixed bag of articles. Looking back after 10 years, some of the analysis in this book led the way to how teams currently operate (see analysis of rising strikeout rates) while some articles were just poorly constructed.
February 25, 2017
When I read "Baseball Between The Numbers", it was pretty much my introduction to baseball sabermetrics and I was hooked. This follow-up edition, however, was a bit of a letdown in that it felt like many categories were "reaches" instead of solid statistical digging.
First of all, I really didn't start getting into the book until about the half-way point. The chapters on scouting don't even have a place in this book IMHO, while the multiple steroids chapters again are not the thought-provoking material of the original book.
When "Extra Innings" finally does shift into high gear, it still remains hit-and-miss. Some chapters are fascinating, while others just left me skimming pages (something I never did in "Between The Numbers").
Overall, "Extra Innings" was just an okay read for me. Maybe that was inevitable because I had already been introduced to the concepts before, but I just felt that there were too many "reaches" in this book to really get my mind engaged like "Between the Numbers" did on nearly every page.
First of all, I really didn't start getting into the book until about the half-way point. The chapters on scouting don't even have a place in this book IMHO, while the multiple steroids chapters again are not the thought-provoking material of the original book.
When "Extra Innings" finally does shift into high gear, it still remains hit-and-miss. Some chapters are fascinating, while others just left me skimming pages (something I never did in "Between The Numbers").
Overall, "Extra Innings" was just an okay read for me. Maybe that was inevitable because I had already been introduced to the concepts before, but I just felt that there were too many "reaches" in this book to really get my mind engaged like "Between the Numbers" did on nearly every page.
April 6, 2015
Another good update. Some chapters were amazing.
Exciting stuff like Pitch f/x, pitcher injury analysis, steroids, nanotechnological athlete enhancement, juiced ball physics, and bat physics, signal that baseball analytics is moving in a hard science direction, as much of what is to be discovered through bare-bone statistical analysis has been exhausted.
A couple of chapters by Jason Parks on Scouting Latin American players and scouting players in general, here at the top sabermetric company, shatters the myth fabricated in Moneyball that scouts and statistics are at war. I actually got a chance to meet Jason Parks in DC a month ago. He said he saw Wei-chung Wang pitch somewhere and he was the best pitcher there. I wish I had asked him more about Wang.
The most disappointing chapter, I felt, was on how the Orioles, Royals, and Pirates can compete. I thought he was going to talk about unpicked fruit in analytics, but it turned out to be some historical interpretation.
There were also a couple of violations of statistical principles in this one. The Pearson Correlation is not a prediction statistic, as Colin Wyers said in "When Does a Hot Start Become Real?" Also a bad critique of a statistical counterargument in Goldman's chapter on evaluating managers.
Overall, good read.
Exciting stuff like Pitch f/x, pitcher injury analysis, steroids, nanotechnological athlete enhancement, juiced ball physics, and bat physics, signal that baseball analytics is moving in a hard science direction, as much of what is to be discovered through bare-bone statistical analysis has been exhausted.
A couple of chapters by Jason Parks on Scouting Latin American players and scouting players in general, here at the top sabermetric company, shatters the myth fabricated in Moneyball that scouts and statistics are at war. I actually got a chance to meet Jason Parks in DC a month ago. He said he saw Wei-chung Wang pitch somewhere and he was the best pitcher there. I wish I had asked him more about Wang.
The most disappointing chapter, I felt, was on how the Orioles, Royals, and Pirates can compete. I thought he was going to talk about unpicked fruit in analytics, but it turned out to be some historical interpretation.
There were also a couple of violations of statistical principles in this one. The Pearson Correlation is not a prediction statistic, as Colin Wyers said in "When Does a Hot Start Become Real?" Also a bad critique of a statistical counterargument in Goldman's chapter on evaluating managers.
Overall, good read.
February 1, 2016
An interesting way to look at baseball.
A number of short essays that cover everything from the response to steroids to how players are scouted/acquired/developed. The writers discuss how we can evaluate general managers and field managers. There are essays on pitching, fielding and offense.
And these are all from the perspective of using statistics and math to draw conclusions.
Some of the essays were a little too obtuse for me. Others are down right eye opening.
Consider the conclusion of evaluating field managers: "... so few aspects of the game are under their control, and the few that they can interfere with are often approached incompetently."
It's late in the game. Your starter is getting tired. The next batter up is a lefty. Common wisdom says that you send in your right handed pitcher against a left handed batter. So what happens if your right handed pitcher is mediocre at best and you have a star left handed pitcher rested and ready to go? A so-so righty against a left handed batter or a proven left-handed winner against a lefty?
Do you keep a poor fielder as a starter if he is an above average hitter and gets on base a lot? It depends on how many games you lose because of his fielding and how many you win because of his bat.
A number of short essays that cover everything from the response to steroids to how players are scouted/acquired/developed. The writers discuss how we can evaluate general managers and field managers. There are essays on pitching, fielding and offense.
And these are all from the perspective of using statistics and math to draw conclusions.
Some of the essays were a little too obtuse for me. Others are down right eye opening.
Consider the conclusion of evaluating field managers: "... so few aspects of the game are under their control, and the few that they can interfere with are often approached incompetently."
It's late in the game. Your starter is getting tired. The next batter up is a lefty. Common wisdom says that you send in your right handed pitcher against a left handed batter. So what happens if your right handed pitcher is mediocre at best and you have a star left handed pitcher rested and ready to go? A so-so righty against a left handed batter or a proven left-handed winner against a lefty?
Do you keep a poor fielder as a starter if he is an above average hitter and gets on base a lot? It depends on how many games you lose because of his fielding and how many you win because of his bat.
June 6, 2016
Briefly: Took its eye off the ball
In the original Baseball Between the Numbers, Baseball Prospectus showed the way statistical reasoning could be applied to many longstanding baseball questions. This time around, the team strives to tackle many questions for which an immediate application of statistics appears difficult. Unfortunately, the way the writing team addresses those problems quickly shows that first impressions can be accurate. The book bounces between chapters that don’t even touch on any sort of statistical, comprehensive approach to things (“How Can We Evaluate General Managers?” is nothing more than a long form essay on Theo Epstein’s managerial style) to tackling subjects where the statistics come up short (“Could Stephen Strasburg’s Injury Have Been Prevented or Predicted?” is a jargon-y attempt to use numbers that point to no conclusions). The book’s chapters do include some gems, such as its examination of scouting, age and the amateur draft, and bullpen usage. The introduction, too, is a great look at advanced stats and the reasoning behind them. But ultimately, this book tries too hard to push beyond the boundaries of what sabermetrics does best.
In the original Baseball Between the Numbers, Baseball Prospectus showed the way statistical reasoning could be applied to many longstanding baseball questions. This time around, the team strives to tackle many questions for which an immediate application of statistics appears difficult. Unfortunately, the way the writing team addresses those problems quickly shows that first impressions can be accurate. The book bounces between chapters that don’t even touch on any sort of statistical, comprehensive approach to things (“How Can We Evaluate General Managers?” is nothing more than a long form essay on Theo Epstein’s managerial style) to tackling subjects where the statistics come up short (“Could Stephen Strasburg’s Injury Have Been Prevented or Predicted?” is a jargon-y attempt to use numbers that point to no conclusions). The book’s chapters do include some gems, such as its examination of scouting, age and the amateur draft, and bullpen usage. The introduction, too, is a great look at advanced stats and the reasoning behind them. But ultimately, this book tries too hard to push beyond the boundaries of what sabermetrics does best.
May 30, 2012
Extra Innings is an excellent follow-up to Baseball Between the Numbers. In many ways, it is superior to it's predecessor. Especially informative were the chapters by Jason Parks on scouting and player development. Colin Wyers brings us up to date on the state of fielding metrics (hint: we have a long way to go), and there are excellent chapters on the amateur draft and what we should make of the "steroid era." I can't imagine there could be a baseball fan who wouldn't enjoy this book. I only have one criticism, which has been mentioned by others: the high number of typographical errors. For some reason, this is a persistent problem for Baseball Prospectus, but I don't think the problem is nearly widespread enough to obscure the strengths of this book.
July 4, 2012
No. I didn't read it in a day, just noticed when I finished that I had forgotten to add it to the list. I am a baseball fan and have an interest in numbers and statistics but this book based on the statistical analysis of baseball is definitely overkill. I am not surprised at it's popularity given the rise of the "Moneyball" style of management, but I am not sure I want to know there is a database being generated for every pitch thrown in major league ball with regard to result, speed, location, type, movement, etc. and a corresponding database for every swing. Sometimes you just want to kick back with a hot dog and a beer and enjoy the action - stats be damned!
March 14, 2013
This book was decent, but nowhere near as good as Baseball Between the Numbers: Why Everything You Know About the Game Is Wrong. The high point was the analysis of the impact of the Steroid Era on the Hall of fame. Low points included an overly long section on scouting in South America.
March 27, 2014
This is a collection of essays on baseball from a sabermetric perspective. But don't think of it as a book on statistics. Think of it as Freakonomics for baseball. The authors ask interesting questions about roster construction, how to evaluate amateur talent, and in-game tactics, and provide thoughtful answers based on data. But it isn't about crunching numbers. It's about the thought process. It's about how some folks think about baseball, and it's fascinating.
January 13, 2013
Interesting read for baseball fans. Makes some new and interesting challenges to conventional wisdom about defense and does a solid job of framing saber-metric areas of study for the future. A little too math intensive (without solid explanation) and not enough baseball anecdotes for me to give it 5 stars, but a solid follow-up to Between The Numbers. If you liked Baseball Between The Numbers, this book is better and you will enjoy it.
April 18, 2014
Meh. Not as good as Baseball Between the Numbers Why Everything You Know About the Game Is Wrong. I think they had to dig deeper for topics and delve into more specific areas, some of which were interesting but usually they didn't warrant more than a few pages.
April 14, 2014
Didn't have the same weight as the first "Between the Numbers" book, which I found very eye-opening and thought-provoking.
Maybe it's just a result of being exposed to so many sabermetric voices over the past few years, but this collection felt very meh. Or at least very "yes, yes, we have read this before on BaseballProspectus.com, Fangraphs.com, TheHardballtimes.com, etc..."
Maybe it's just a result of being exposed to so many sabermetric voices over the past few years, but this collection felt very meh. Or at least very "yes, yes, we have read this before on BaseballProspectus.com, Fangraphs.com, TheHardballtimes.com, etc..."
March 26, 2014
There were a lot of typo errors in the book but it continued the discussion from the previous book by Baseball Prospectus "Baseball Between the Numbers" quite well. It explained a lot of the terms of Sabremetrics such as Warp, FIP, OPS, etc. This is the way baseball is trending by using these stats to get a true evaluation of each player.
March 15, 2014
It's possible I would have given this a higher grade a few years ago. Now, I skipped a lot of the chapters, not having the patience to hack through the dense statistics and dry writing. The work presented is fascinating, but the presentation leaves a lot of runners on base. It's what always set Bill James apart from his peers.
September 16, 2014
I always enjoy the sabermetric inquiry into the game of baseball, it's so refreshing from the talk radio emotional blowhards.
Only quibble, is that some of the information and theories already feel dated and this was just published after the 2011 season. Nonetheless I look forward to BP's next tome.
Only quibble, is that some of the information and theories already feel dated and this was just published after the 2011 season. Nonetheless I look forward to BP's next tome.
April 9, 2012
The Jay Jaffe pieces on the Hall of Fame and the piece on the effect of steroids in baseball are worth the price of admission, as well as Jason Park's on scouting players, but many of the other articles are sorely lacking.
November 16, 2012
As with any anthology, some chapters are better than others, and much of the whole section on drafting and development is just not interesting, but by and large this is more great writing and great analysis from the smartest baseball guys around.
May 19, 2013
Wow, these writers are no keen on Jeter.
A collection of essays, each examining a different baseball statistic or case study illustrating the use of the statistic. Good for baseball nerds, but probably too dense for a general audience.
A collection of essays, each examining a different baseball statistic or case study illustrating the use of the statistic. Good for baseball nerds, but probably too dense for a general audience.
March 23, 2016
Where baseball and math intersect. Get it? Intersect. I love baseball and like math but found at times the math got a bit too confusing. I did appreciate that one of my favorite sports could be viewed academically.
November 6, 2012
Excellent series of essays on the current state of baseball. The section on player acquisition and development as well as on the use of relief pitchers is especially interesting.
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February 15, 2013Good book for stat geeks.
June 29, 2015
This book really made me think a lot deeper about baseball. Some chapters were more interesting than others, but overall I liked it.
May 28, 2016
I'm not smart enough to understand some of the elements contained in this book, but the practical suggestions & summary statements are enlightening!
September 26, 2017
Long time BP subscriber so I have a different view than most. The lengthy PED discussion is pedantic and dated now, 5-6 years after publication. The rest is sound analysis and well written.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 31 reviews