Many fans enjoy keeping track of baseball action with easy abbreviations written on simple grids. Serious scorekeeping, however, is more complicated than just jotting down runs, outs, and the final score. Official scorekeeping requires a thorough knowledge of a large body of rules--many of which are confusing, and all of which must be followed carefully to ensure that the scorekeeper's data are valid. With confidence and enthusiasm, Andres Wirkmaa leads the reader through the daunting maze of rules that govern official scorekeeping. Chapters explain and clarify the official scorer's duties, responsibilities and authority; the official scorer's reports; and all the game-to-game details such as player listings, substitute batters and runners, out-of-turn batters, called and forfeited games, runs batted in, base hits, stolen bases, sacrifices, putouts, assists, double and triple plays, errors (and instances when errors are not charged), wild pitches and passed balls, bases on balls, strikeouts, earned runs, winning and losing pitchers, and saves. Also covered are statistics, percentage records, minimum standards for individual championships, and consecutive hitting and playing streaks.
Baseball Hacks isn't your typical baseball book--it's a book about how to watch, research, and understand baseball. It's an instruction manual for the free baseball databases. It's a cookbook for baseball research. Every part of this book is designed to teach baseball fans how to do something. In short, it's a how-to book--one that will increase your enjoyment and knowledge of the game. So much of the way baseball is played today hinges upon interpreting statistical data. Players are acquired based on their performance in statistical categories that ownership deems most important. Managers make in-game decisions based not on instincts, but on probability - how a particular batter might fare against left-handedpitching, for instance. The goal of this unique book is to show fans all the baseball-related stuff that they can do for free (or close to free). Just as open source projects have made great software freely available, collaborative projects such as Retrosheet and Baseball DataBank have made great data freely available. You can use these data sources to research your favorite players, win your fantasy league, or appreciate the game of baseball even more than you do now. Baseball Hacks shows how easy it is to get data, process it, and use it to truly understand baseball. The book lists a number of sources for current and historical baseball data, and explains how to load it into a database for analysis. It then introduces several powerful statistical tools for understanding data and forecasting results. For the uninitiated baseball fan, author Joseph Adler walks readers through the core statistical categories for hitters (batting average, on-base percentage, etc.), pitchers (earned run average, strikeout-to-walk ratio, etc.), and fielders (putouts, errors, etc.). He then extrapolates upon these numbers to examine more advanced data groups like career averages, team stats, season-by-season comparisons, and more. Whether you're a mathematician, scientist, or season-ticket holder to your favorite team, Baseball Hacks is sure to have something for you. Advance praise for Baseball Hacks: "Baseball Hacks is the best book ever written for understanding and practicing baseball analytics. A must-read for baseball professionals and enthusiasts alike." -- Ari Kaplan, database consultant to the Montreal Expos, San Diego Padres, and Baltimore Orioles "The game was born in the 19th century, but the passion for its analysis continues to grow into the 21st. In Baseball Hacks, Joe Adler not only demonstrates thatthe latest data-mining technologies have useful application to the study of baseball statistics, he also teaches the reader how to do the analysis himself, arming the dedicated baseball fan with tools to take his understanding of the game to a higher level." -- Mark E. Johnson, Ph.D., Founder, SportMetrika, Inc. and Baseball Analyst for the 2004 St. Louis Cardinals
Baseball is America's pastime, and baseball fans are the ones keeping it that way. Not just the buy-me-some-peanuts-and-Cracker-Jack fans, but the true fanatics: the ones with worn-out gloves, rally caps, jerseys, alternate jerseys, and enough broadcast calls of their team's greatest moments committed to heart to fill a box CD collection. Some are outwardly fanatical, earning their way onto team compilation videos with wild hair, face paint, signs, and dancing. Others are fanatical in the way they observe, closely eyeing every pitch, pickoff, and outfielder's jump with a fine-tuned finesse honed over thousands of innings.These fanatics with finesse are baseball's aficionados. And this is the Aficionado's Scorebook for Baseball.Capture every detail of every game, from the weather and time of the first pitch to the count your team's slugging third baseman had when he roped a hanging curveball down the left field line for a walk-off double (though he would've rounded the bases all the way to the next state if he could). Let the raised-ink cover show some age as you track your son's high school team all the way to the state final. Bring your scorebook home from the ballpark and leave it on the coffee table to show exactly where you were for that complete game shutout in Game 6, or exactly where you've been on your numerous road trip stops to check off another ballpark.Fanatics with finesse don't just cheer today, they relish in the greatness of baseball for a lifetime. Score your baseball memories like a true aficionado today.
SABR 50 at 50 celebrates and highlights the Society for American Baseball Research’s wide-ranging contributions to baseball history. Established in 1971 in Cooperstown, New York, SABR has sought to foster and disseminate the research of baseball—with groundbreaking work from statisticians, historians, and independent researchers—and has published dozens of articles with far-reaching and long-lasting impact on the game. Among its current membership are many Major and Minor League Baseball officials, broadcasters, and writers as well as numerous former players. The diversity of SABR members’ interests is reflected in this fiftieth-anniversary volume—from baseball and the arts to statistical analysis to the Deadball Era to women in baseball. SABR 50 at 50 includes the most important and influential research published by members across a multitude of topics, including the sabermetric work of Dick Cramer, Pete Palmer, and Bill James, along with Jerry Malloy on the Negro Leagues, Keith Olbermann on why the shortstop position is number 6, John Thorn and Jules Tygiel on the untold story behind Jackie Robinson’s signing with the Dodgers, and Gai Berlage on the Colorado Silver Bullets women’s team in the 1990s. To provide history and context, each notable research article is accompanied by a short introduction. As SABR celebrates fifty years this collection gathers the organization’s most notable research and baseball history for the serious baseball reader.
The essential resource for players and fans of the game. Included are the sport's official playing rules, pitching regulations, referee signals, and field diagrams for fast and slow pitch, both 12 inch and 16 inch.
Baseball has no other book like this. In The Joy of Keeping Score, Paul Dickson celebrates one of the most unusual traditions in all of sports—the baseball scorecard. To Dickson and to fans everywhere, baseball without a scorecard or box score is unthinkable. And within the history of the scorecard are some of baseball's greatest moments. From the first scorecard introduced in 1845, to the scoring system devised by direct-marketing genius L. L. Bean; from presidential scoring habits to batting titles decided by official scorers to Phil Rizzuto's inspired scoring symbol "WW,* Dickson delights in his subject. Henry Chadwick (the inventor of the scorecard), Ty Cobb, Mel Allen and Red Barber, FDR and Ike, concessionaire Harry M. Stevens, California Angels' official scorer, Ed Munson, and many others all play their parts in this history. Among this book's many illustrations is a gallery of historic scorecards, some of them from baseball's most memorable contests, including Don Larsen's perfect game in the 1956 World Series, Babe Ruth's "called" home run, and Cal Ripken's record-breaking 2,131st consecutive game. In addition, Dickson provides basic and advanced scoring techniques for fans who record the games they see, a year-by-year timeline of rule changes, a guide to baseball's quirkiest statutes, stories of famous scoring blunders, and many more unexpected rewards. For those who keep or have kept score, this book will be an elixir. For those who haven't, it will be a revelation. For baseball fans everywhere, it will be a treasure.
Want to connect to your favorite team? Why not track a full 162 regular game season with your very own baseball scorebook. Each sheet provides ample space to enter a lineup and track plays in diamond format. As an extra bonus, 38 extra scorecards have been provided in this handy notebook to track playoffs, spring training, or span across multiple seasons. Each page also includes a handy positional chart to use as a reference. Features: 200 scorecards 8.5" X 11" format Room for Pitchers, Catchers, and Umpires Track Attendance, Weather, Game Time, and more! Create a piece of history for your team this year!
In “a worthy companion to . . . Boys of Summer,” a Pulitzer prize winning journalist “exploits the power of memory and nostalgia with literary grace” (New York Times). From award-winning New York Times columnist Dan Barry comes the beautifully recounted story of the longest game in baseball history—a tale celebrating not only the robust intensity of baseball, but the aspirational ideal epitomized by the hard-fighting players of the minor leagues. On April 18, 1981, a ball game sprang eternal. For eight hours, the night seemed to suspend a town and two teams between their collective pasts and futures, between their collective sorrows and joys—the shivering fans; their wives at home; the umpires; the batboys approaching manhood; the ejected manager, peering through a hole in the backstop; the sportswriters and broadcasters; and the players themselves—two destined for the Hall of Fame (Cal Ripken and Wade Boggs), the few to play only briefly or forgettably in the big leagues, and the many stuck in minor-league purgatory, duty bound and loyal forever to the game. With Bottom of the 33rd, Barry delivers a lyrical meditation on small-town lives, minor-league dreams, and the elements of time and community that conspired one fateful night to produce a baseball game seemingly without end. An unforgettable portrait of ambition and endurance, Bottom of the 33rd is the rare sports book that changes the way we perceive America’s pastime—and America’s past. “Destined to take its place among the classics of baseball literature.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Bottom of the 33rd is chaw-chewing, sunflower-spitting, pine tar proof that too much baseball is never enough.” —Jane Leavy, author of The Last Boy and Sandy Koufax
