Keri asks a lot of interesting questions about baseball while looking for quantitative answers. He starts off each chapter with the questions he aims to answers and methodically goes about answering them. I think that is the problem. The revelations are wonderfully interesting and changed the way I look at baseball, but damn if I did not struggle to get through most of these chapters.

I think that Keri tried to make everything easy to understand. In a vacuum each chapter is straight forward, but taken together it feels like a jumbled mess. After reading Money Ball I thought I could handle a technical statistical book about baseball, but I think I fell below the Mendoza Line.

Not a bad book, but way too much for me. Too much math, too many references to players I don't know, and not as much explanation as I would like. I think they did a much better job with Mind Game.

The good news is, they decided Babe Ruth was a better baseball player than Barry Bonds, so all is right with the world.

Overall the analysts at Baseball Prospectus do an admirable job of analyzing baseball issues with unbeatable statistics.

At times, however, they’ll cherry-pick the statistics to prove a dubious point, viz. they claim Barry Bonds never used performance enhancing drugs. They skip over Bonds' enlarged head (a side effect of the massive use of Human Growth Hormone). In fact, they skip over nearly everything in the book “Games of shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO, and the steroids scandal that rocked professional sport”.

Nonetheless, they make important points. For example, almost all major league teams have a closer who pitches only the ninth inning, even if they’re ahead by 3 runs with nobody on base. The book’s writers make the common sense point, backed up by statistics, that it would make much more sense to use the closer in high-leverage situations (runners on base with a lead of less than 3 runs) in the 6th, 7th, or 8th inning.

Sabrmetrics is a very interesting topic, this is not for everyone, but i found it engaging to read i also have the follow up extra innings. Sabrmetrics is now finding itself being used in pro basketball aka the NBA....it will change the game. btw sabr is short for society of american baseball researchers.