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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 796
EAN num: 9780312322236
ISBN number: 0312322232
Label: St. Martin's Griffin
Manufacturer: St. Martin's Griffin
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 288
Printing Date: May 02, 2005
Publishing house: St. Martin's Griffin
Release Date: April 21, 2005
Sale Popularity Level: 566112
Studio: St. Martin's Griffin
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
Most baseball fans, players and even team executives assume that the national pastime's infatuation with statistics is simply a by-product of the information age, a phenomenon that blossomed only after the arrival of Bill James and computers in the 1980s. They couldn't be more wrong.
In this award-winning book, Alan Schwarz - whom bestselling Moneyball author Michael Lewis calls 'one of today's best baseball journalists' - provides the first-ever history of baseball statistics, showing how baseball and its numbers have been inseparable ever since the pastime's birth in 1845. He tells the history of this obsession through the lives of the people who felt it most: Henry Chadwick, the 19th-century writer who invented the very first box score and harped endlessly about which statistics mattered and which did not; Allan Roth, Branch Rickey's right-hand numbers man with the late-1940s Brooklyn Dodgers; Earnshaw Cook, a scientist and Manhattan Project veteran who retired to pursue inventing the perfect baseball statistic; John Dewan, a former Strat-O-Matic maven who built STATS Ltd. into a multimillion-dollar powerhouse for statistics over the Internet; and dozens more.
Schwarz paints a history not just of baseball statistics, but of the soul of the sport itself. Named as ESPN's 2004 Baseball Book of the Year, The Numbers Game will be an invaluable part of any fan's library and go down as one of the sport's classic books.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
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Yes, this is a book about baseball statistics and the numbers - but more than that, it discusses the people who made these statistics more important, starting with Henry Chadwick and onward to the present time - there is more biographical info on these people and how they developed their work with numbers - Schwarz doesn't go too deeply into the numbers but talks more about the people themselves - I think I learned more about Bill James in his chapter than I have in books specifically about him. A definite must have for your baseball collection.
Rated by buyers 
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This was a tough book for me to read It was a dry book I do love numbers, but Im not sure I love Books about numbers. Yet I got a lot out of this book Stats to value, and the history of Baseball stats.
Its full of names, Most you wont remember But you see how even early on Owners of teams learned to value what the numbers predicted. And later it goes on to show how the numbers became important to Free Agency. You learn one of the very first to value Stats was and the computer was Sandy Alderson Who later nurtured Billy Beane
As a Kid I played some of the Games described in this book APba and one other. And I kept stats on those games Just like Bill james and some of the other stat freaks described in this book
So I saw myself in this book to a point except I didnt carry on with it............ Sigh, it would have been a great lifes work Maybe thats why the book was hard to read
Rated by buyers -
If you are a baseball fan with any interest in statistics (and how can one be a baseball fan WITHOUT an interest in statistics), then this book is a must-have. Schwarz has written a fascinating book giving the history of baseball statistics, getting into the personalities, politics and trivia involved. A wonderful book!
Rated by buyers -
Schwarz has a very good feel for the near-fanatics who populate the landscape of baseball numerics. Given the 150+ years of the sport's history, it's not an easy task to capture the flavor of times past and the role these characters played. Yet in a few hundred pages that's exactly what he does, while giving a concise picture of how numbers and their perception have radically changed the way baseball talent and teams are viewed.
Rated by buyers 
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I'm a geek and a stats-head.
But, even I got bored with this book about the history of stats. It was informative, but a history of stats? Augh...
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