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Baseball's Lifelong Fascination with Statistics
St. Martin's Griffin
April 2005
288 pages
ISBN: 0312322232
Trade Size (reprint)
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Non-Fiction
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 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 Inc. 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.
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