I tried to love this book, but I am not smart enough. I'm not sure anyone is.

This book is tough to read straight through, some of the chapters are dense, but still an awesome job. Fantastic information.

Probably the best baseball book I've ever read. The only contender would be Money Ball. If Money Ball got me thinking about numbers (aside from RBI), this book was my baptism into sabermetrics.

Baseball Between the Numbers is a collection of essays on baseball topics, each highlighting a different idea. The articles are backed up with statistics/math, which are explained easily enough. This book taught me many critical ideas about advanced baseball numbers like WAR, defensive metrics, and base-running value. The essays take on interesting narrative driven lines of thought, like what if Rickey Henderson didn't steal bases? This keeps the chapters and topics from being too dense and devolving into a statistical journal. All of the essays are standalone pieces that don't reference each other. Because of that you can pick and choose what is interesting or skip chapters you're not enjoying. Not all articles are specifically about what happens on the field, like asking the question "who should finance baseball stadiums".

If you're interested in learning to think more cryptically about baseball, this is the best resource that I've found. I read it in one weekend but it may be better served read over time instead of cover to cover. Highly recommend.

Fun book on sabermetrics. If you're a stat-head or just love baseball you'll enjoy this book.

Let it be said, that the gang of eight (henceforth known as the authors) issued a warning on page xiii that “nine out of ten Americans don’t like numbers” and that their book could be enjoyed (their word) by readers “only mildly conversant with numbers.” Though I don’t think of myself as being challenged by statistical analysis, I was encouraged to continue when the authors suggested that the book would be “quietly tiptoeing past the numbers but not necessarily through the numbers.” Like Smoky Burgess trying to score from second on a sharply lined single to Roberto Clemente, I should have stopped right there. Instead, I ran through the STOP sign and you can guess the rest.

If your enjoyment/understanding of the game is enhanced by pondering charts and graphs, you have found your book. If not, you’ll find this to be a tedious path towards appreciating the nuances that make the game so attractive to many.

Having been familiar with sabermetric analysis of baseball while also having read Baseball Prospectus and many of the authors that are included in this compilation online, most of the topics covered were not new to me. However, it is a concise volume containing and explaining in laymen's terms many of the most basic and vital sabermetric approaches and how they vastly change the way any fan should look at the game.

If you liked "Moneyball", and if you are my friend you better have liked "Moneyball", then you should read this book. Strong series of essays using SABER to analyze all kinds of phenomena in baseball. Great book.

If you're a baseball fan and if you're a baseball fan that loves numbers, this book is a great read. Using statistics, Baseball Prospectus writers present a series of essays or articles to answer various baseball questions. These questions are not just related to player performance (Are teams letting their closers go to waste?) but off-the-field questions as well (Are new stadiums a good deal?). The only negative of reading this is that it was written in the mid-2000s, so many of the examples aren't very current. The concepts were still fascinating though.

Alphabet soup and then some. It had been years since I've read a baseball book of any kind, and with Baseball Prospectus seeming to be a knowledgeable group I thought this might be a decent read.

The writing is mediocre at best as the BP "team of experts" loves to quote their own research from previously published articles. There is a tendency by BP to say "should have" and "could have" in reference to a game that is in their own words, unpredictable at best.

Interesting theories abound and it would be wholly entertaining for a manager to implement many of BP's ideas, though it seems an AL manager would work best as BP is in no way a fan of "small ball." Between the Numbers regulates stealing bases and sacrifice bunts to the trash heap. In fact, BP goes so far as to say that Ricky Henderson's 130 steals in 1982 were not helpful to the Oakland A's at all and would have been better off if Ricky hadn't even attempted one.

According to Between the Numbers, many of baseball's measuring sticks are irrelevant, (such as Batting Average, RBI's, Pitcher's Wins and ERA). And the writers set about to debunk many of the games current ideas (e.g. 4 vs. 5 man pitching rotations, "protecting" a hitter, where to place your best hitter in a lineup, and for that matter the importance of the lineup at all).

Despite all of the statistics, and BP twists the numbers like the Texas Cyclone will twist your stomach, there are relatively few conclusions in the book at all. Fortunately, the so-called experts of Between the Numbers did determine Babe Ruth was a better ball player than Barry Bonds, though the Babe's pitching stats had to be included for Ruth to be better. Strictly on the offensive side, BP found Bonds to be a better batter. For those that disagree with that conclusion, there is a chapter on Stats and Steroids.

On the whole, the book was worth reading for the theories, though none of it will help my fantasy team.

While I liked it, it referenced statistics that I am somewhat familiar with, but, they didn't explain how those statistics were compiled and/or calculated. I get some of them are not easily calculated, but, at least a hint at how they came with the would be nice. I know many of them were arrived at using empirical data gained by perusing databases that store complete baseball statistics, using data mining methods. But, not all of them. Some were calculated values that they explained usage for but not how they were arrived at. Also, I believe many of them are values that are available on their website, but, only premium paying members can have access to.

Great book, goes into some interesting discussions. However, the book wreaks of intellectual property and trade secrets. Every time the authors have a chance to explain something in detail, they instead defer to explaining it in general layman's terms as if we cannot possibly be intelligent enough to follow some of the gritty details involved in the thought process that went into generating some of their statistical measurements. The authors stay annoyingly predictable in their descriptions of the statistics as if they are hiding something (they are- most if not all of these statistics are property of baseball prospectus...the website charges a monthly fee to join- only then can you get a more detailed look at the measurements). I know I sound very negative, but I did enjoy the book greatly despite the one annoying quality. I'd recommend it to anyone that is not an expert in baseball stats- there is something for all of us to learn in it.

A smart look at baseball analysis and failures of professional baseball decision-makers