Future Value

Future Value
Author: Eric Longenhagen
Publisher: Triumph Books
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2020-04-14
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 1641253975

An unprecedented look inside the world of baseball scouting and evaluation from two of the industry's top prospect analysts For the modern Major League team, player evaluation is a complex, multi-pronged, high-tech pursuit. But far from becoming obsolete in this environment—as Michael Lewis' Moneyball once forecast—the role of the scout in today's game has evolved and even expanded. Rather than being the antithesis of a data-driven approach, scouting now represents an essential analytical component in a team's arsenal. Future Value is a thorough dive into baseball's changing world of talent acquisition and development, a world with its own language, methods, metrics, and madness. From rural high schools to elite amateur showcases, from the back fields of spring training to major league draft rooms, Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel break down the key systems and techniques used to assess talent. It's a process that has moved beyond the quintessential stopwatches and radar guns to include statistical models, countless measurable indicators, and a broader international reach. ?Practical and probing, discussing wide-ranging topics from tool grades to front office politics, this is an illuminating exploration of how to watch baseball and see the future.

Ron Shandler's 2022 Baseball Forecaster

Ron Shandler's 2022 Baseball Forecaster
Author: Brent Hershey
Publisher: Triumph Books
Total Pages: 682
Release: 2022-02-08
Genre: Games & Activities
ISBN: 1637270577

For more than 35 years, the very best in baseball predictions and statistics The industry's longest-running publication for baseball analysts and fantasy leaguers, Ron Shandler's Baseball Forecaster, published annually since 1986, is the first book to approach prognostication by breaking performance down into its component parts. Rather than predicting batting average, for instance, this resource looks at the elements of skill that make up any given batter's ability to distinguish between balls and strikes, his propensity to make contact with the ball, and what happens when he makes contact—reverse engineering those skills back into batting average. The result is an unparalleled forecast of baseball abilities and trends for the upcoming season and beyond.

Baseball Prospectus 2021

Baseball Prospectus 2021
Author: Baseball Prospectus,
Publisher: Baseball Prospectus
Total Pages: 1079
Release: 2021-01-23
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 1950716864

The 2021 edition of The New York Times Bestselling Guide. PLAY BALL! The 26th edition of this industry-leading baseball annual contains all of the important statistics, player predictions and insider-level commentary that readers have come to expect, along with significant improvements to several statistics that were created by, and are exclusive to, Baseball Prospectus, and an expanded focus on international players and teams. Baseball Prospectus 2021 provides fantasy players and insiders alike with prescient PECOTA projections, which The New York Times called “the überforecast of every player’s performance.” With more than 50 Baseball Prospectus alumni currently working for major-league baseball teams, nearly every organization has sought the advice of current or former BP analysts, and readers of Baseball Prospectus 2021 will understand why!

Baseball Prospectus Futures Guide 2021

Baseball Prospectus Futures Guide 2021
Author: Baseball Prospectus,
Publisher: Baseball Prospectus
Total Pages: 526
Release: 2021-02-09
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 1950716899

Futures Guide 2021 features: Detailed reports on top 10 prospects for every major-league team. Condensed reports on many additional key prospects for each team. Top talents 25 years old and younger for each team. Baseball Prospectus’ 2021 organizational rankings. Top 101 real-life and fantasy prospects. Top 50 players who entered pro baseball in 2021. Additional essays on various prospect and scouting related topics

The Cooperstown Casebook

The Cooperstown Casebook
Author: Jay Jaffe
Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
Total Pages: 465
Release: 2017-07-25
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1250071216

The Cooperstown Casebook by Jay Jaffe provides a definitive guide to the greatest players in baseball history, and the Hall of Fame.

The Giants and Their City

The Giants and Their City
Author: Lincoln A. Mitchell
Publisher: Kent State University Press
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2021-03-02
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 9781606354209

Searching for a home and a homerun--an overlooked era of Giants and San Francisco history The San Francisco Giants have been one of the most successful franchises in baseball in the twenty-first century as evidenced by the three World Series Championship flags flying in the breeze over Oracle Park, one of the most beautiful baseball venues in the world. However, the team was not always so successful on or off the field. The Giants and Their City tells the story of a Giants franchise that had no recognizable stars, was last in the league in attendance, and had more than one foot out the door on the way to Toronto when a local businessman and a brand new mayor found a way to keep the team in San Francisco. Over the next 17 years, the team had some very good years, but more than few terrible ones, while trying to find a home in a city with a unique and confounding political culture. The Giants and Their City relates how the team struggles to win ballgames, find its way back to the playoffs, but also to stay in San Francisco when, at times, it wasn't clear the city wanted them. This book is a baseball story about beloved Giants players like Vida Blue, Willie McCovey, Kevin Mitchell, and Robby Thompson, and includes interviews with Art Agnos, Frank Jordan, Dianne Feinstein, John Montefusco, Will Clark, Kevin Mitchell, Mike Krukow, Dave Dravecky and Bob Lurie among others. The book features descriptions of important events in Giants history like the Mike Ivie grand slam, the Joe Morgan home run, the 1987 playoffs, the 1989 team, the Dave Dravecky game and the earthquake World Series. It's also a uniquely San Francisco story that shows how sports teams and cities often have very complex relationships.

The Inside Game

The Inside Game
Author: Keith Law
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2020-04-21
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 0062942743

In this groundbreaking book, Keith Law, baseball writer for The Athletic and author of the acclaimed Smart Baseball, offers an era-spanning dissection of some of the best and worst decisions in modern baseball, explaining what motivated them, what can be learned from them, and how their legacy has shaped the game. For years, Daniel Kahneman’s iconic work of behavioral science Thinking Fast and Slow has been required reading in front offices across Major League Baseball. In this smart, incisive, and eye-opening book, Keith Law applies Kahneman’s ideas about decision making to the game itself. Baseball is a sport of decisions. Some are so small and routine they become the building blocks of the game itself—what pitch to throw or when to swing away. Others are so huge they dictate the future of franchises—when to make a strategic trade for a chance to win now, or when to offer a millions and a multi-year contract for a twenty-eight-year-old star. These decisions have long shaped the behavior of players, managers, and entire franchises. But as those choices have become more complex and data-driven, knowing what’s behind them has become key to understanding the sport. This fascinating, revelatory work explores as never before the essential question: What were they thinking? Combining behavioral science and interviews with executives, managers, and players, Keith Law analyzes baseball’s biggest decision making successes and failures, looking at how gambles and calculated risks of all sizes and scales have shaped the sport, and how the game’s ongoing data revolution is rewriting decades of accepted decision making. In the process, he explores questions that have long been debated, from whether throwing harder really increases a player’s risk of serious injury to whether teams actually “overvalue” trade prospects. Bringing his analytical and combative style to some of baseball’s longest running debates, Law deepens our knowledge of the sport in this entertaining work that is both fun and deeply informative.

The Shift

The Shift
Author: Russell Carleton
Publisher: Triumph Books
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2018-03-08
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1641250135

With its three-hour-long contests, 162-game seasons, and countless measurable variables, baseball is a sport which lends itself to self-reflection and obsessive analysis. It's a thinking game. It's also a shifting game. Nowhere is this more evident than in the statistical revolution which has swept through the pastime in recent years, bringing metrics like WAR, OPS, and BABIP into front offices and living rooms alike. So what's on the horizon for a game that is constantly evolving? Positioned at the crossroads of sabermetrics and cognitive science, The Shift alters the trajectory of both traditional and analytics-based baseball thought. With a background in clinical psychology as well as experience in major league front offices, Baseball Prospectus' Russell Carleton illuminates advanced statistics and challenges cultural assumptions, demonstrating along the way that data and logic need not be at odds with the human elements of baseball—in fact, they're inextricably intertwined. Covering topics ranging from infield shifts to paradigm shifts, Carleton writes with verve, honesty, and an engaging style, inviting all those who love the game to examine it deeply and maybe a little differently. Data becomes digestible; intangibles are rendered not only accessible, but quantifiable. Casual fans and statheads alike will not want to miss this compelling meditation on what makes baseball tick.

Studs Terkel's Working

Studs Terkel's Working
Author: Harvey Pekar
Publisher: The New Press
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2009
Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN: 1595583211

Transforms sixteen short oral histories originally published in "Working" into graphic novel vignettes, including stories from a stock broker, a labor organizer, a proofreader, a gravedigger, a mail carrier, and a jazz musician.