Percentage Baseball And The Computer

Baltimore: Waverly Press, 1971. First edition. Follow-up to Cook's 1964 Percentage Baseball , an early assessment of using statistical methods to optimize baseball outcomes. Forerunner to Bill James' sabermetrics and Moneyball. S igned and dated by the author . Toning to front and rear pastedowns and free endpapers. Near fine without dust wrapper as issued. Cook set out "to prove, once and for all, damn it, that Ty Cobb was better than Babe Ruth.everyone agreed that a home run was more valuable than a single, but by how much? To what extent did stolen bases and the venerable sacrifice aid in the scoring of runs? Come to think of it, what was the optimal lineup order? How should relief pitchers be used? Cook didn't want to go "by the book," blindly accepting the time-honored answers to these questions -- so he wrote a book of his own. In fits and starts over several years, Cook holed up in his study, overlooking the golf course, and pounded on baseball statistics. His slide rule and colored pencils stood at attention above his angled drafting table, piles of The Sporting News and its "Baseball Register" at the ready. Sports Illustrated [writer] Frank Deford learned of this quirky baseball scientist and mentioned him to his editor, who dispatched the young writer to interview Cook during the winter of 1964. The editor liked the piece so much he made it the lead feature story of the March 23 issue, with the headline 'BASEBALL IS PLAYED ALL WRONG.'. Cook's rigorous mathematics ultimately failed him on both ends of the reader spectrum. Baseball fans were spooked by the intercept coefficients, distribution curves, and bizarre graphical techniques that recalled too many failed algebra quizzes. Professional statisticians, meanwhile, accused "Percentage Baseball" of sloppy and amateurish use of probability theory.[H]owever, Cook was asked by the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown to donate the slide rule on which he did some of his calculations for Percentage Baseball. 'I am more than content,' he typed in a note of appreciation, 'to present my last testament herewith to the Greatest Game of them all.'" (excerpted from Alan Schwarz, The Numbers Game St. Martin's Press, 2004).…