Smart Baseball by Keith Law; Vin Scully

I would have loved Keith Law's Smart Baseball (William Morrow, 2017) when I was eleven years old and fascinated by baseball statistics, recalculating the batting averages of my favorite players after each game.  It amuses me that statistics have been getting more and more complicated as fewer and fewer fans understand them:  my experience is that only very sophisticated fans  (who are mostly older) can even tell you how to calculate slugging percentage and ERA and most fans have  little idea what these numbers actually mean (most announcers don't know either or they would tell you once in a while).  Meanwhile all teams are doing statistical analysis that dates from what Bill James started with his "abstracts" in 1977, rating players by various formulae for Wins Above Replacement, a compendium of individual stats that show how many more wins an individual is responsible for than would be the case with a top AAA player replacing him.  These formulae all have inherent problems due to all the variables that have to be taken into account, from the dimensions of parks to the problems with analyzing fielding to who the pitcher is.  Even James himself has become concerned with the overuse of stats since Michael Lewis published Moneyball, about Billy Beane and the Oakland A's in 2003. I certainly think statistics have their place and Law's book is a fairly solid summary of current thinking about stats but I care, at this point, more for the beauty of the game and gladly leave the statistics to others, though I do enjoy reading about them, just as I enjoy reading about the long and fascinating history of baseball. 

For a different approach this week instead of watching the all-star game (baseball for those who do not like baseball; see my post of July 15, 2014)  I watched a Dodgers/Rays game from July 26, 2016, mainly because it was an MLB channel game I had taped,  played in L.A. , with Vic Scully announcing.  There are a number of reasons why Vin Scully adds so much to a game (unlike other announcers who subtract from the enjoyment and whom I often mute):  he works alone (no babbling about favorite restaurants or other irrelevancies that are so common with multiple announcers), he knows a great deal about baseball and its history, he knows when to be quiet and often lets the game speak for itself, he has an eye for the poetry of the game,  and he sees the players as individual human beings and not just a collection of statistics.  His descriptions of what players are doing in the on-deck circle, what kind of wood they like for their bats and even what they like to cook (he described how Brandon Guyer picked out a turkey and related it to how he looked at pitches).