The Sabermetric Revolution: Assessing the Growth of Analytics in BaseballBenjaminBaumer and AndrewZimbalist. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.

Abstract

The Sabermetric Revolution: Assessing Growth of Analytics in Baseball Benjamin Baumer and Andrew Zimbalist. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.The baseball purist and hard core baseball fan will enjoy reading re search-laden text offered by Baumer and Zimbalist in The Saberme trie Revolution: Assessing Growth of Analytics in Baseball, a seven-chap ter discourse on study of saberme tries and its influence on baseball scouting and player evaluation in poststeroids era. The authors begin their research by defining key terms used throughout book. First, saberme tries is defined as the use of methods to analyze player performance and game strategy (xiii), while baseball analytics is use of stats to evaluate team and league business decisions (xiii). From beginning, this book, which is reserved for hardcore baseball fan who is interested in how and why baseball statistics work, goes into far more detail than hits, walks, and runs batted in.Baumer and Zimbalist commence their research by drawing comparisons between 2003 book Money - ball written by Michael Lewis and 2011 feature film Moneyball In latter, Oakland A's tried to remain competitive by using certain statistics in order to identify undervalued players who could fit within their system in order to compete for a World Series title. However, film fails to provide a full representation of what happened in Oakland. Meanwhile, Lewis's book provided argument that through new analysis, A's were able to field a competitive team despite having a small budget (7). The authors claim that book and movie can be recognized mostly as entertainment media, but both leave a distorted reality of saber metric theory (21). Due to increasing salary value on players, scouts and managers have relied upon use of analysis in order to assess today's players. The authors opine that statistical analysis is here to stay (22).In text, authors note that it is arduous to understand every sab er metric equation or formula, and, as a result, most assistant general managers have a background in some type of quantitative training (24). For example, Table Two illustrates that, in 2012, thirty teams had employees with an analytic back- ground (26). Due to explosion of Internet and social media, use of sab er metrics has now grown rapidly, many MLB offices have employees who work primarily with analytics, and information is much greater for scouts and managers than ever before (37). …