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Scouting and Scoring: How We Know What We Know about Baseball
An in-depth look at the intersection of judgment and statistics in baseball
Scouting and scoring are considered fundamentally different ways of ascertaining value in baseball. Scouting seems to rely on experience and intuition, scoring on performance metrics and statistics. In Scouting and Scoring , Christopher Phillips rejects these simplistic divisions. He shows how both scouts and scorers rely on numbers, bureaucracy, trust, and human labor in order to make sound judgments about the value of baseball players.
Tracing baseball’s story from the nineteenth century to today, Phillips explains that the sport was one of the earliest and most consequential fields for the introduction of numerical analysis. New technologies and methods of data collection were supposed to enable teams to quantify the drafting and managing of players―replacing scouting with scoring. But that’s not how things turned out. Over the decades, scouting and scoring started looking increasingly similar. Scouts expressed their judgments in highly formulaic ways, using numerical grades and scientific instruments to evaluate players. Scorers drew on moral judgments, depended on human labor to maintain and correct data, and designed bureaucratic systems to make statistics appear reliable. From the invention of official scorers and Statcast to the creation of the Major League Scouting Bureau, the history of baseball reveals the inextricable connections between human expertise and data science.
A unique consideration of the role of quantitative measurement and human judgment, Scouting and Scoring provides an entirely fresh understanding of baseball by showing what the sport reveals about reliable knowledge in the modern world.
Scouting and scoring are considered fundamentally different ways of ascertaining value in baseball. Scouting seems to rely on experience and intuition, scoring on performance metrics and statistics. In Scouting and Scoring , Christopher Phillips rejects these simplistic divisions. He shows how both scouts and scorers rely on numbers, bureaucracy, trust, and human labor in order to make sound judgments about the value of baseball players.
Tracing baseball’s story from the nineteenth century to today, Phillips explains that the sport was one of the earliest and most consequential fields for the introduction of numerical analysis. New technologies and methods of data collection were supposed to enable teams to quantify the drafting and managing of players―replacing scouting with scoring. But that’s not how things turned out. Over the decades, scouting and scoring started looking increasingly similar. Scouts expressed their judgments in highly formulaic ways, using numerical grades and scientific instruments to evaluate players. Scorers drew on moral judgments, depended on human labor to maintain and correct data, and designed bureaucratic systems to make statistics appear reliable. From the invention of official scorers and Statcast to the creation of the Major League Scouting Bureau, the history of baseball reveals the inextricable connections between human expertise and data science.
A unique consideration of the role of quantitative measurement and human judgment, Scouting and Scoring provides an entirely fresh understanding of baseball by showing what the sport reveals about reliable knowledge in the modern world.
320 pages, Hardcover
Published March 26, 2019
19 people are currently reading
163 people want to read
About the author
Christopher Phillips
115 books10 followersChristopher Phillips is Professor of History and Department Head at the University of Cincinnati.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
April 6, 2022
I will be the first to admit that this book was a surprise for me. I picked it up on a whim (thanks, if I recall, to a Goodreads recommendation). It ended up being an absolute delight both in terms of baseball as well as research.
This book is a little bit about statistics, but it's also about baseball history. It's about the age old tension between using stats to assess value compared to other less quantifiable metrics. The central thread through the book is the evaluation of Hall of Famer Craig Biggio. When Biggio was in college, scouts had to quantify his value to baseball teams. Was he a future superstar or not? Figuring out how to rank baseball players based on very idiosyncratic abilities is a fascinating process. How much is he worth? How much might he be worth as he develops?
The book follows a historical trajectory, showing how the earliest statisticians somewhat haphazardly began gathering data via game reports. As time moved forward into the 20th century (and through the modern era), more scientific types of reports became increasingly more common. As the money rose within the game, so too did the technology to improve analysis. By the end of the century and the book, the technology became almost unbearable. There's more data than people know what to do with, causing new problems about the value of certain data over others.
The book made me think about baseball, of course, but it also made me consider how we know what we know about all sorts of things. It's about the very human, very real challenge of gathering statistics in the first place. There's a whole chapter about "scoring" in baseball; it's not just about the runs and who wins the game. Every swing of the bat is a judgement call. Every play must be recorded for posterity, full of split second decisions by players as well as those observing and reporting the game. Over time, we (sports fans) collectively agree that this is the best possible way to know what we know about the game. So we measure the home runs, the strikeouts, and the batting average of the great ones to determine the Hall of Fame or other timeless accolades. But all along, each moment on a baseball diamond must be observed and reported by relatively nameless folks who collect what we know about the game.
I would 100% recommend this book for a sports history class. In fact, if I ever get a chance to teach another sports history class this would immediately go to the top of my list for possible books to use. I would also recommend it for sports management type programs. Heck, I think people teaching statistics might enjoy using this book; it's great.
This book is a little bit about statistics, but it's also about baseball history. It's about the age old tension between using stats to assess value compared to other less quantifiable metrics. The central thread through the book is the evaluation of Hall of Famer Craig Biggio. When Biggio was in college, scouts had to quantify his value to baseball teams. Was he a future superstar or not? Figuring out how to rank baseball players based on very idiosyncratic abilities is a fascinating process. How much is he worth? How much might he be worth as he develops?
The book follows a historical trajectory, showing how the earliest statisticians somewhat haphazardly began gathering data via game reports. As time moved forward into the 20th century (and through the modern era), more scientific types of reports became increasingly more common. As the money rose within the game, so too did the technology to improve analysis. By the end of the century and the book, the technology became almost unbearable. There's more data than people know what to do with, causing new problems about the value of certain data over others.
The book made me think about baseball, of course, but it also made me consider how we know what we know about all sorts of things. It's about the very human, very real challenge of gathering statistics in the first place. There's a whole chapter about "scoring" in baseball; it's not just about the runs and who wins the game. Every swing of the bat is a judgement call. Every play must be recorded for posterity, full of split second decisions by players as well as those observing and reporting the game. Over time, we (sports fans) collectively agree that this is the best possible way to know what we know about the game. So we measure the home runs, the strikeouts, and the batting average of the great ones to determine the Hall of Fame or other timeless accolades. But all along, each moment on a baseball diamond must be observed and reported by relatively nameless folks who collect what we know about the game.
I would 100% recommend this book for a sports history class. In fact, if I ever get a chance to teach another sports history class this would immediately go to the top of my list for possible books to use. I would also recommend it for sports management type programs. Heck, I think people teaching statistics might enjoy using this book; it's great.
May 19, 2019
The author has researched and presents the history of the work done by baseball scorers that documents each game forming the basis of the many statistical measures of baseball performance along with the work of baseball scouts who support decision making on who does (and doesn't) become a major league baseball player. He assumes most people believe that the first is a fairly objective process while the second is more subjective, but since both are mediated by individuals, he suggests this isn't accurate.
Much of his inspiration is associated with the Moneyball philosophy that baseball (and everything else) can be quantified for decision making rather than relying on personal impressions and opinions. Big data will make everything better, and at a lower cost and more efficiently. In a somewhat polemical approach to this, historian Phillips documents his disagreement with much of this kind of thinking.
I was looking for of an understanding of the history of official scoring in baseball rather than anything else, and this worked for that more or less. I was less interested in the second part of the book that looks mostly at scouting. It seemed repetitive in what it had to say, somehow.
The book is around 250 pages of text but there is also about 30 pages of detailed notes that I think should have been footnotes rather than at the end. Some of the more interesting statements are in the notes, I thought. I only realized they were there as I approached the end of the book, and paged through them scanning for interesting stuff after finishing the rest of it.
The author chose a single player, Craig Biggio, who played for the Houston Astros and other teams, as his main continuing example of how players were assessed in different ways. He seems like a good choice to make certain points but for a baseball book, I think a surprisingly small number of players are discussed here. That may be a good thing. Not sure.
Much of his inspiration is associated with the Moneyball philosophy that baseball (and everything else) can be quantified for decision making rather than relying on personal impressions and opinions. Big data will make everything better, and at a lower cost and more efficiently. In a somewhat polemical approach to this, historian Phillips documents his disagreement with much of this kind of thinking.
I was looking for of an understanding of the history of official scoring in baseball rather than anything else, and this worked for that more or less. I was less interested in the second part of the book that looks mostly at scouting. It seemed repetitive in what it had to say, somehow.
The book is around 250 pages of text but there is also about 30 pages of detailed notes that I think should have been footnotes rather than at the end. Some of the more interesting statements are in the notes, I thought. I only realized they were there as I approached the end of the book, and paged through them scanning for interesting stuff after finishing the rest of it.
The author chose a single player, Craig Biggio, who played for the Houston Astros and other teams, as his main continuing example of how players were assessed in different ways. He seems like a good choice to make certain points but for a baseball book, I think a surprisingly small number of players are discussed here. That may be a good thing. Not sure.
May 24, 2020
This is a remarkably humanistic book about a profoundly dehumanising tendency in sport – the tendency to quantify. Phillips builds his case from a critical assessment of the Moneyball myth that seems to reify quantitative data as the source of sporting assessment. (As an aside, much as I understand the appeal of Moneyball as a reference point, I prefer to see Phillip Roth’s
The Great American Novel
as the start of a critique of quantification.) He unpacks his critique not by challenging those data, but by exploring how they have come into existence. This is not, however, a detailed assessment of statistical methods but a social and cultural history of the networks of people and ideas that have built baseball’s quantitative evidence base. At the heart of his argument is the significance of judgment in how that knowledge has been built, and a case that for the most part, in baseball at least, the shifts seen in data analytics in the last 20 years or so are changes in magnitude, not changes in kind. It’s a compelling argument.
The case is built around sequential discussions of scoring and scouting, arguing that both have got to a stage where they reduce complex questions involving significant subjective judgment to simple numerical indicators in an effort to enhance comparability. Although he doesn’t say this quite as explicitly, the underpinning principle of this reduction seems to be a widespread view that somehow the meaning of numbers is clearer and more straightforward – a view Phillips sets out to debunk.
He opens with an exploration of the ways that the data derived from and for scoring has been developed from the earliest systematic collection of performance data in the late 19th century, and its systematisation in the early 20th. It would be easy to have fallen into a technical discussion but although technology focused, as in focusing on the artefacts – score sheets and the like – Phillips explores the social networks and institutional arrangements. In doing so he discusses the role of leagues and clubs, the place of journalists as score keepers, the changing rules surrounding the practice and especially the place of subjective assessment (what counts as fielder error and therefore unearned run, for instance).
A key part of this section is an exploration of the work that went into building data bases, procedures in place to reconcile data where there were inconsistencies, and the enormous and complex work that went into translating print copy data into computerised and then on-line record sets. Much of this discussion he build around a single simple question: how do we know that there were 30 doubles hit in 1907? The specific answer to the question (was it actually 30?) is less relevant than the ‘how do we know’ part – which is all to do with the complex arrangements for building data with integrity. At the heart of this discussion is the simple point that every data set is only as good as the people who enter the data into it, so the key is having systems in place to ensure that accuracy – and this section of the book explores the social and cultural arrangements as well as the institutional structures that mean we can trust those data.
The discussion of scouting has a different emphasis, at least at the outset, where, as with some of the scoring discussion, he is interested in the role of judgment and how that translates into comparable accurate data. There are very different institutional arrangements involved in scouting, where at least until 1965 scouts signed players: the draft changed all of that. Scouting became centralised and a considerable amount of the data shared. Club decision-makers become more isolated from many of those who wrote their scouting reports, which became more standardised, so clubs began to expect a higher degree of consistency and comparable information from scouts. As with scoring, systems became more bureaucratised and common; also as with scoring much of this relied on extensive labour to ensure consistency.
Phillips draws on the career of Craig Biggio, a former Houston Astro Hall of Famer, who did not at the outset seem a convincing candidate, with decision-making over several years turning on performance data. Phillips returns to Biggio repeatedly to illustrate his points; given the complexity and subtlety of the discussion it is a sharp tactic, allowing readers a common reference point. Yet, as noted, this is not technical discussion but a social and cultural history, so it is an analysis of networks of institutions and individuals. He seems more comfortable developing this discussion when dealing with artefact-based systems, so the initial discussion of coaching where he is discussing the disparate practice of individual practitioners, albeit within a defined system, is less coherent than the exploration of scoring and post-draft scouting. In both those cases there are emerging commonly deployed artefacts.
His discussions of what seems to be an arcane, technical set of issues is in fact a sophisticated exploration of cultures of management and the sorts of evidence available to allow clubs to be making safe business decisions. Even then, the richness and importance of the book is not highlighted. This is a rare social history of quantitative data, how it some into being, the work cultures and business practices that underpin a key business component of commercial sport. It is valuable reading for historical insight, and I suspect important for those interested in the kind of evidence that not only frames sport business but also systems of talent identification and recruitment.
That said, however, the conclusion is perplexing. Phillips fails to look outwards to consider the ways that these kinds of work practices are significant across sport business, focusing instead on notions of truth and expertise, which might be consistent with Phillips’ interest in intellectual history of science. I can’t help but think he missed an opportunity to develop questions related to work and culture that might be important in other sport settings. Even with that weakness, there is nothing else like this in sports history that I know of. It is a significant contribution and highly original and comes highly recommended.
The case is built around sequential discussions of scoring and scouting, arguing that both have got to a stage where they reduce complex questions involving significant subjective judgment to simple numerical indicators in an effort to enhance comparability. Although he doesn’t say this quite as explicitly, the underpinning principle of this reduction seems to be a widespread view that somehow the meaning of numbers is clearer and more straightforward – a view Phillips sets out to debunk.
He opens with an exploration of the ways that the data derived from and for scoring has been developed from the earliest systematic collection of performance data in the late 19th century, and its systematisation in the early 20th. It would be easy to have fallen into a technical discussion but although technology focused, as in focusing on the artefacts – score sheets and the like – Phillips explores the social networks and institutional arrangements. In doing so he discusses the role of leagues and clubs, the place of journalists as score keepers, the changing rules surrounding the practice and especially the place of subjective assessment (what counts as fielder error and therefore unearned run, for instance).
A key part of this section is an exploration of the work that went into building data bases, procedures in place to reconcile data where there were inconsistencies, and the enormous and complex work that went into translating print copy data into computerised and then on-line record sets. Much of this discussion he build around a single simple question: how do we know that there were 30 doubles hit in 1907? The specific answer to the question (was it actually 30?) is less relevant than the ‘how do we know’ part – which is all to do with the complex arrangements for building data with integrity. At the heart of this discussion is the simple point that every data set is only as good as the people who enter the data into it, so the key is having systems in place to ensure that accuracy – and this section of the book explores the social and cultural arrangements as well as the institutional structures that mean we can trust those data.
The discussion of scouting has a different emphasis, at least at the outset, where, as with some of the scoring discussion, he is interested in the role of judgment and how that translates into comparable accurate data. There are very different institutional arrangements involved in scouting, where at least until 1965 scouts signed players: the draft changed all of that. Scouting became centralised and a considerable amount of the data shared. Club decision-makers become more isolated from many of those who wrote their scouting reports, which became more standardised, so clubs began to expect a higher degree of consistency and comparable information from scouts. As with scoring, systems became more bureaucratised and common; also as with scoring much of this relied on extensive labour to ensure consistency.
Phillips draws on the career of Craig Biggio, a former Houston Astro Hall of Famer, who did not at the outset seem a convincing candidate, with decision-making over several years turning on performance data. Phillips returns to Biggio repeatedly to illustrate his points; given the complexity and subtlety of the discussion it is a sharp tactic, allowing readers a common reference point. Yet, as noted, this is not technical discussion but a social and cultural history, so it is an analysis of networks of institutions and individuals. He seems more comfortable developing this discussion when dealing with artefact-based systems, so the initial discussion of coaching where he is discussing the disparate practice of individual practitioners, albeit within a defined system, is less coherent than the exploration of scoring and post-draft scouting. In both those cases there are emerging commonly deployed artefacts.
His discussions of what seems to be an arcane, technical set of issues is in fact a sophisticated exploration of cultures of management and the sorts of evidence available to allow clubs to be making safe business decisions. Even then, the richness and importance of the book is not highlighted. This is a rare social history of quantitative data, how it some into being, the work cultures and business practices that underpin a key business component of commercial sport. It is valuable reading for historical insight, and I suspect important for those interested in the kind of evidence that not only frames sport business but also systems of talent identification and recruitment.
That said, however, the conclusion is perplexing. Phillips fails to look outwards to consider the ways that these kinds of work practices are significant across sport business, focusing instead on notions of truth and expertise, which might be consistent with Phillips’ interest in intellectual history of science. I can’t help but think he missed an opportunity to develop questions related to work and culture that might be important in other sport settings. Even with that weakness, there is nothing else like this in sports history that I know of. It is a significant contribution and highly original and comes highly recommended.
January 1, 2025
This was painful to get through. Being baseball-obsessed I thought there weren’t many baseball books that I wouldn’t find interesting, but this is one of them.
February 6, 2021
Fun book about the history of scoring and scouting in baseball, if, you know, you're into that sort of thing. Which I certainly was to an obsessive degree when I was younger. So it was a fun visit back to the obsessions of my youth.
Really well researched and written account of how scoring and scouting developed throughout the history of baseball. Remarkable what we take for granted when looking at stats now vs stats from the early 1900s - the collection of statistics was rather haphazard initially, so when we look at Ty Cobb and Nap Lajoie's stats vs (as used as an example in the book) Craig Biggio, how do we REALLY know how many double Lajoie hit in 1906? Documents how sabermaticians pored over old log books from teams, when they were available and not lost or destroyed, to recreate not only players stats, but the entire flow of the games. Phillips uses the stats of yesteryears to also point out that, even today, things are not necessarily perfect - hits vs. errors are subject to human subjectivity, which even today affect avg, era, whip, etc.
The 2nd half of the book explores the development of scouting through the years, how it's trying to become more and more objective, but can never be fully so, since it does require a combination of deep baseball knowledge and subjectivity with statistics. So, while the scouts' job may have become much more bureaucratic as teams try to remove human fallibility, there's just no way to disentangle it completely since, especially when scouting amateur players where the quality of competition in high school and even college is so inferior as to render stats meaningless. Despite the rhetoric of Moneyball, there's just no way to fully disengage from scouts who have just been around forever, true baseball people.
Really well researched and written account of how scoring and scouting developed throughout the history of baseball. Remarkable what we take for granted when looking at stats now vs stats from the early 1900s - the collection of statistics was rather haphazard initially, so when we look at Ty Cobb and Nap Lajoie's stats vs (as used as an example in the book) Craig Biggio, how do we REALLY know how many double Lajoie hit in 1906? Documents how sabermaticians pored over old log books from teams, when they were available and not lost or destroyed, to recreate not only players stats, but the entire flow of the games. Phillips uses the stats of yesteryears to also point out that, even today, things are not necessarily perfect - hits vs. errors are subject to human subjectivity, which even today affect avg, era, whip, etc.
The 2nd half of the book explores the development of scouting through the years, how it's trying to become more and more objective, but can never be fully so, since it does require a combination of deep baseball knowledge and subjectivity with statistics. So, while the scouts' job may have become much more bureaucratic as teams try to remove human fallibility, there's just no way to disentangle it completely since, especially when scouting amateur players where the quality of competition in high school and even college is so inferior as to render stats meaningless. Despite the rhetoric of Moneyball, there's just no way to fully disengage from scouts who have just been around forever, true baseball people.
August 31, 2019
Scouting and Scoring is an academic look at how data comes into existence using baseball as a backdrop. For the data analyst, it is a reminder that while it certainly can seem like tabular information grows on trees these days the truth of the matter is that some person somewhere has generated that data. For the baseball fan, it's yet another conclusive argument that scouting and statistics are not diametrically opposed as some storytellers would have their readers believe.
That said, it certainly a book written for the more studious baseball fan. The book can be very easily parsed into the two halves of its title. The scoring half of the book leads off and acts as a bit of a supplement to Alan Schwarz's The Number Game by exploring the why of the scoring systems employed and how the data was cleansed and produced into its current state. It is the stronger of the two halves of Christopher Phillips' argument. The scouting part makes up the back half of the book, highlighting how the process of scouting evolved over time with the changes in how baseball clubs acquire new players before exploring the openly-acknowledged humanity involved in creating that information. It seemed as though Phillip had less insight about how scouting data was being used, unsurprising given how scouting data is not generally publicized data. This, unfortunately, left a few gaps that I presume he had hoped to answer by talking to someone who worked in the business but was unable to interview.
Still, this is a must read for the statistorians of SABR, and an interesting read for those who are general baseball fans or data analysts with some understanding of the sport.
That said, it certainly a book written for the more studious baseball fan. The book can be very easily parsed into the two halves of its title. The scoring half of the book leads off and acts as a bit of a supplement to Alan Schwarz's The Number Game by exploring the why of the scoring systems employed and how the data was cleansed and produced into its current state. It is the stronger of the two halves of Christopher Phillips' argument. The scouting part makes up the back half of the book, highlighting how the process of scouting evolved over time with the changes in how baseball clubs acquire new players before exploring the openly-acknowledged humanity involved in creating that information. It seemed as though Phillip had less insight about how scouting data was being used, unsurprising given how scouting data is not generally publicized data. This, unfortunately, left a few gaps that I presume he had hoped to answer by talking to someone who worked in the business but was unable to interview.
Still, this is a must read for the statistorians of SABR, and an interesting read for those who are general baseball fans or data analysts with some understanding of the sport.
May 10, 2019
It's an odd book in that it kept alternating between portions that I found really interesting and parts that I couldn't retain anything from after reading. It's a 3.5 stars book, but my overall impression is positive, so I'll kick it up to four stars.
Phillips's main contention (stated directly in the conclusion) is that a lot of "human sciences" are becoming data sciences, and that includes things like scoring and scouting. Scouts have a reputation for being lone wolfs hunting out prospects on their own - but Phillips notes that their job is really acting as a cog in a bureaucratic machine. The turning point in their profession was the institution of the 1965 amateur draft, and now they mostly file reports instead of personally signing prospects. As part of the reports, they have to quantify how valuable they think a prospects skills are. There's been an increasingly numeric quantification of scouting (reports, radar guns, etc) that's been going on for decades prior to Moneyball).
The sections on scoring detail how we developed the modern scorecard - and the Project Scoresheet version that's essentially at the heart of how MLBAM collects data. And the first chapter of the book gives me a whole new appreciation for Pete Palmer, as he's done more than anyone else to create the most accurate database for baseball stats of anyone.
Phillips's main contention (stated directly in the conclusion) is that a lot of "human sciences" are becoming data sciences, and that includes things like scoring and scouting. Scouts have a reputation for being lone wolfs hunting out prospects on their own - but Phillips notes that their job is really acting as a cog in a bureaucratic machine. The turning point in their profession was the institution of the 1965 amateur draft, and now they mostly file reports instead of personally signing prospects. As part of the reports, they have to quantify how valuable they think a prospects skills are. There's been an increasingly numeric quantification of scouting (reports, radar guns, etc) that's been going on for decades prior to Moneyball).
The sections on scoring detail how we developed the modern scorecard - and the Project Scoresheet version that's essentially at the heart of how MLBAM collects data. And the first chapter of the book gives me a whole new appreciation for Pete Palmer, as he's done more than anyone else to create the most accurate database for baseball stats of anyone.
August 30, 2019
During my sophomore year of college, I took a statistics course. It was a required class, thus I treated it like a required class, with great disdain. Surprisingly, it was the most interesting classes I took that semester and easily the most useful class I ever took in college. The things I learned in that class helped me through graduate school and even in my professional life. But more importantly, having a good grasp of statistics has made me a better baseball fan.
If I had the ability to rewind and do school all over again, I think I would try data and statistics as a career. Baseball has obviously championed data over the past decade or so, but so has most other sports and professions.
Scouting and Scoring is an interesting into the nitty-gritty of baseball. Most books on baseball stats, talk about the numbers and what they mean, but in this book, you learn how we get those numbers in the first place. You think of the numbers as being objective, but in reality, there are mounds of subjectivity. And speaking of subjectivity, scouting is still a guessing game made by people. Over the years, there has been countless attempts to standardize scouting but in the end, it is a real big game of chance.
This book was good but it felt longer that it needed to be. The section on scoring was great. The section on scouting was a tad boring.
If I had the ability to rewind and do school all over again, I think I would try data and statistics as a career. Baseball has obviously championed data over the past decade or so, but so has most other sports and professions.
Scouting and Scoring is an interesting into the nitty-gritty of baseball. Most books on baseball stats, talk about the numbers and what they mean, but in this book, you learn how we get those numbers in the first place. You think of the numbers as being objective, but in reality, there are mounds of subjectivity. And speaking of subjectivity, scouting is still a guessing game made by people. Over the years, there has been countless attempts to standardize scouting but in the end, it is a real big game of chance.
This book was good but it felt longer that it needed to be. The section on scoring was great. The section on scouting was a tad boring.
November 25, 2019
Mr. Phillips has written a clear, understandable analysis of two ways of understanding baseball. One through observation e handed by experience with the game as a player or spectator. The other, through the collection and analysis of the data the game (players and officials) generates as it is played. Mr. Phillips's thesis, a I understand it is that the evaluation of players through personal observation of through the statistics the game creates are both ultimately subjective and complementary. Combined statistics and observation yield a more complete picture of the game than either one does by itself. A second major point of his analysis is that those who scout amateur players, professional players and compile and analyze the statistics and create models of the game seek to minimize individual variance through education/training, rules, quantification and standardization of practice. Mr. Phillips has written a clear and well written argument and book that I a fan of the game for 70 years thoroughly enjoyed.
December 27, 2019
I enjoyed this book as someone that read a lot of James, studied the old Total Baseball books, and has used Foreman’s database. The history of scoring was interesting as is the evolution of scouting. Everything comes down to humans in the end. I enjoyed this book, but I think you have to really appreciate the process of data collection to enjoy this book.
October 23, 2021
Really interesting history of scouting and scoring and trying to put the stories together in the context of how data is created. However, and this may be my sabermetric bias I found his argument about how scouts are creating data artifacts is comparable to the process of scoring and the creation of advanced metrics to be wanting.
March 3, 2022
A joy for the dedicated baseball fan. An inside look at the technique and history of Major League scouting (a little long and repetitive, but interesting nevertheless) and the history of scorekeeping; its evolution, Official Scorers and all sorts of details. Good book and engagingly written.
June 8, 2022
Ok, I bought this book just based on the title. It ended up being much different than what I expected, but a very interesting read. It focuses on the history of how we obtain statistics and evaluate players, including quantifying our predictions of a player’s future value.
April 26, 2019
Good book, but a bit "weedsy." You will not enjoy it if you don't really, really like baseball.
July 10, 2019
deep and wide review of application of statistics to baseball players. fascinating story of attempts to rate players by numbers.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews