MONEYBALL AND BASEBALL PROSPECTUS. The 2018 edition of BASEBALL PROSPECTUS has been published. The annual book is essential for fans who are interested in the statistical approach to baseball that I refer to as Moneyball. The heart of BASEBALL PROSPECTUS is a set of statistics based on an algorithm, called PECOTA, which was begun by Nate Silver before he moved on to applying statistics to politics in his FiveThirtyEight website. PECOTA forecasts a player’s statistics for 2018 based on his past statistics. The book has commentary and statistics for each of more than 2100 players. In addition to statistics for each player, the book has commentary which brings the player, and his statistics, to life.
Nick and his colleague Collin Whitchurch wrote the comments for White Sox players.
What’s exciting is the statistical developments haven’t stopped. Harry Pavlidis & Co. continue to develop new metrics for evaluating pitchers and pitch framing by catchers, for example.
As statistical analysis improves I enjoy seeing it dovetail with Old Baseball Wisdom. E.g. catchers’ receiving skills are more important than we thought. Pitch tunneling is another development to measure a key aspect of pitching, which is deception.