Review: The Only Rule Is It Has to Work

Last summer, Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller embarked on the kind of fantasy baseball adventure that most of us can only dream about: they were appointed the baseball operations department of the Sonoma Stompers, and independent-league baseball team in California.  In contrast to a minor league affiliate, independent-league teams have to find and secure their own talent.  They do so largely by feeding off the dregs of the minor league systems: players who play in independent baseball do so because they either weren't drafted into MLB's minor league system after college, or they were signed but then were subsequently released.  And while some guys play ball simply because they enjoy the game, most of the guys available to the Stompers are playing explicitly for another chance at a career in affiliated baseball.

Even so, as the baseball operations department, this was a chance for Sam and Ben to test a lot of their ideas about baseball teams in a real world situation.  This included novel ideas about roster construction in independent leagues, using college statistics to find good ballplayers, and even, as the season went on, in-game strategy.  As the summer's data accumulated into larger datasets, Ben and Sam started to tinker with extreme fielding arrangements (shifts!  5-man infields!  4-man outfields!), unconventional reliever usage, sabermetric-minded batting orders, etc.  All of those strategies that we in the stat-head baseball blogosphere argue the big league clubs should do?  This was the chance to implement those strategies, and Sam and Ben don't waste the opportunity to do so.  The Only Rule Is It Has To Work is the tale of their efforts.

They have some wonderful successes.  But they also have their share of challenges, both on and off the field.  They soon butt heads with the manager they hire.  Other teams try to poach their players.  Some of their players underperform horrifically.  Opposing teams sign half a roster of new players.  All the while, we get to go along for the ride, living in the authors' minds.  Ben and Sam take turns writing chapters throughout the book, and so we get both of their perspectives--which are often very different--on key moments in the Stompers season.  All the while, we readers get to play armchair quarterback, thinking about what we might do in those same situations.

Nevertheless, the book manages to be more than just a recounting of a fun experiment in independent baseball.  As baseball fans will attest, the full experience of baseball brings with it a certain melancholy to accompany its triumphs.  That melancholy is revealed when playing out a doomed season, in watching aging players fail where they'd once succeeded, and in seeing hardworking players get cut through no fault of their own.  The vast majority of young men who want to become one of the 750 players on a major league active roster fail to realize that dream, and most never even come close.  This frustrating failure is the soul of the greatest baseball film of all time, Bull Durham, and it's also one of this book's unexpected successes.  We get to know the players of the 2015 Sonoma Stompers.  We celebrate their successes with child-like enthusiasm.  And we suffer through their failures, which carry a lot more weight; failure in independent ball often spells the ultimate end to players' careers.

It's that melancholy, stacked on top of the riveting tale of last summer's experiment, that brings me to this: The Only Rule Is It Has To Work is one of the best baseball books I've ever read.  Yes, I'm card-carrying stathead, and I'm a long-time Effectively Wild listener.  I've been looking forward to this book since they announced their project last summer, and even checked the Sonoma Stompers website a few times last season to check on their progress.  Yes, yes, yes, this book is right up my alley.  But even so, this is just a terrific book.  While it certainly does set itself apart from the standard baseball story with its unique premise, the book somehow still manages to encapsulate the full experience of baseball, with all of its highs, lows, and in-betweens.  Buy it and enjoy it.

Full Disclosure: I did receive a review copy from the publisher...but I had already preordered the thing, and was looking forward to reading it anyway!

Book Review: The Slydepress 2014 Redleg Annual

This offseason, Joel Luckhaupt put together a collection of articles authored by some of the most interesting voices in the Reds blogosphere in the form of the Slydepress 2014 Redleg Annual.  Published in e-book format for $3, this annual is reminiscent of some of Joel's previous projects, such as the Maple Street Press annual from a few years back.  I think this might very well be the best of them, however.

The annual begins with a series of short player profiles for most of the Reds' starting 25.  I think these were written by Joel, and they manage to be informative and sophisticated in content while remaining extremely readable and engaging, with minimal mentions of the so-called advanced statistics that happen whenever I write something.  The piece by Manny Parra, for example, highlights his change in repertoire (which I only recently discovered) and gives a measured appraisal of how this should affect our hopes for him in 2014.  I thought his piece on Brandon Phillips was similarly excellent; it notes that his decline might be overstated because 2011 was a career year for Brandon, and because he played hurt for so much of the latter half of 2013.  At the same time, it recognizes his limitations.  Billy Hamilton's profile was easily the most entertaining, but I'll save the punchline for when you buy your copy!

After the profiles are a range of articles that include some that are fairly standard fare for a team annual (not that they're not excellent!), such as evaluations of where the Reds' fielding ranks in the team's history, a celebration of Joey Votto and his Hall of Fame prospects, and looks at some of the upcoming Reds minor leaguers.

But there were also some really original gems in here too.  Here are a few (and apologies to those I don't mention...these were just my favorites!):

• Scott Hoberg of Red Reporter provided a fantastic, practical guide to effective ways to save some money when attending games at Great American Ballpark, down to recommended parking garages as well as good places for pre-game beers.  I'm definitely going to consult this when I'm in Cincinnati this July for a game--it's on my iphone's kindle app!  
• Bryan Harris (also of Red Reporter) got the chance to interview Sam LeCure, which was just fantastic.  My favorite part was how he answered the question of the importance of the catcher to his performance, because I've never heard another pitcher say it before.  After lauding his catchers and noting his confidence in Mesoraco, he dropped this: "But, if you ask me about a certain instance or at-bat in a past game, I can probably tell you almost everything about it except for who's catching."
• Sean Lahman (of the Lahman baseball database) provided a terrific recap and commentary on the 25th anniversary of Pete Rose's banishment from baseball.  I'm a little younger than Sean.  While I do remember Pete Rose's record-breaking hit (I keenly remember listening on the radio), my direct experiences with Pete Rose have come almost entirely after his banishment in 1989.  And frankly, I have a pretty negative opinion of him, so I almost skipped this chapter.  But I'm glad I didn't, because I learned a great deal about the events that occurred back then.  Furthermore, I've really enjoyed reading about Lahman's personal journey as he wrestled with how to respond to his boyhood hero as he came to grips with Rose's deception, and how his views have changed over the two-plus decades since.
• Brian Welch of Chris Sabo's Goggles scored an interview with Chris Sabo himself that is another must-read gem.  Sabo has a reputation as a bit of an odd cat, and I guess that does come across in the interview.  But I found him to be really interesting.  The best part was his dissection of the 1990 Oakland Athletics, who the Reds defeated in that year's World Series.  He makes a compelling case that the Reds really weren't tremendous underdogs in that series, citing strong right-handed pitching to negate their right-handed lineup, and the fact that the 1990 Reds were a very athletic, multidimensional team.  Hindsight is 20/20, of course, but I found Sabo surprisingly insightful.  

A word on the format.  I made the switch over to e-book readers about a year ago, starting a kindle app on my phone/ipad, and then I recently got a kindle paperwhite.  I love them.  For whatever reason, reading on an e-reader seems to fit into my life much better (one of the big advantages is that I can read without a light on when other people in my house are sleeping).  I loved that this annual was designed from the ground up to play nice with e-readers.  The only place where I found that it did NOT work well was in the tables, which were consistently too small to be visible when viewed on my kindle.  When I took a look at the PDF version tonight, however, they are far easier to read.  That said, there aren't a lot of tables or graphics in this book--it really is a book--so this doesn't present a major problem.

So, hopefully this has convinced you to go pick up your copy.  At $3, it's very inexpensive, and it provides a lot of value in its content.  Granted, the 2014 season has already begun.  But we're not so far into the season that our views on many of the Reds players have changed (or, at least, they shouldn't have yet).  Furthermore, much of the content is pretty timeless, including many of the chapters I highlighted above.  And if that doesn't move you, supporting projects like this will make them more likely to happen again in the future!

Disclosure: I've known Joel for a while (as much as you can know anyone on the internet, anyway), and have worked with him on a few projects in the past.  That said, I was not in any way involved in this project, did not consult with him while writing the review, and am reviewing my own personal bought-and-paid-for copy.

Book Review: Baseball Between the Numbers

About two years ago, I started to get really interested in learning about the current state of baseball research. I'd read Moneyball and Numbers Game, and was starting to actively apply the things I'd learned from those books to what I was seeing on the field with my Cincinnati Reds. But as I've continued to try to learn more about what has and has not been done, I've noticed that it can be pretty difficult to find a comprehensive "review" of current research about baseball. There are certainly great sources out there, like Tom Tango's blog and website, The Hardball Times' glossary, and more recently, the BP Toolbox series by Derek Jaques. But if someone came to me asking where they can go to get an overview of current research, I'd have a hard time deciding where to send them.

That is, until I read Baseball Between the Numbers. Edited by Jonah Keri and featuring contributions from a variety of authors from Baseball Prospectus, the goal of this book seems to have been to provide a near-comprehensive view of current baseball research on all facets of the game. They sought to cover everything from performance analysis and on-field strategy to long-term team development and the business side of baseball. They wanted to communicate these findings accurately, all the while keeping the writing approachable to the average intelligent fan. They are remarkably successful in accomplishing these goals. While certainly not perfect, this book is a wonderful resource to someone, like myself, who is trying to learn about all the great work that has been done over the past several decades to better understand baseball.

Here are a few snippits of things I learned while reading this book.

• Closers should be brought in earlier in the ballgame when the situation allows it, though using a closer in a standard closing situation isn't a terrible use of one's ace reliever.
• Earned Run Average is probably not as good a measure of pitching performance as runs allowed per nine innings.
• Teams leading late in the ballgame can be well-served by playing for one run.
• Bunting a runner to third with zero outs is often a better use of an out than bunting a runner to second with zero outs.
• Players do, in fact, perform better in their "walk" year prior to free agency.
• New stadiums are almost always a great deal for the team, but a bad deal for the city that pays for it.
• Some kinds of players lose effectiveness sooner than other players--it's predictable, to some degree.
• There actually is a measurable "clutch" skill that differs among players...though it's really small.
  
• The playoffs aren't a complete crapshoot--particular types of teams do tend to do better than others.

If one puts in the time to read this book, one will walk away with a great foundation of knowledge through which they can understand and interpret the new articles published around the internet. That's a remarkable achievement in just 374 pages.

All that said, there are some notable critiques that one could levy toward this book. First, if one didn't know any better, one could easily walk away from this thinking that all the great baseball research has been done by either Bill James or Baseball Prospectus. It is true that there is some excellent research that goes on at that site, but this text ignores much of the work done outside of their group--and sometimes to their detriment. For example, all discussion of defensive statistics relies on Clay Davenport's defensive translations which, while certainly better than fielding percentage and range factor, fall short when compared to more detailed play-by-play metrics such as Zone Rating, Mitchel Lichtman's UZR, or David Pinto's PMR, all of which have been around and available for many years. There is only a brief mention of these alternatives in the chapter on fielding, and they are said to report results that are simply "very close" to that reported by Davenport's translations. In fact, differences do exist, and they can be substantial.

Those concerns speak to my other major issue with the book, and that is its tone. While not the case in all essays, a substantial number of the articles are written in a tone that is overwhelmingly authoritative--and unfortunately, far more so than the data justify. For example, after failing to detect significant year-to-year correlations between rates at which hitters ground into double plays, James Click writes that "Anyone who's seen many catchers lumber down to first knows that beating out a double play can't be entirely random. Yet the lack of any year-to-year consistency assures us that it is." What should be said is that the effect, if it exists, has not been large enough for us to detect, and is likely confounded by a variety of factors. In fact, there may still be differences, and you may indeed encounter players with unusually high or low double play rates--it's just that the effect is not as strong or common as one might expect it to be.

In this case, as well as other cases in this book, the conclusion seems to me to simply be too strong for what the data can show. There is always a certain degree of uncertainty in data analysis of any kind, and it is a mistake when researchers, be they amateurs or professionals, overstate the strength of their conclusions. In fact, it actually hurts one's arguments when one does this, because when a rare exception comes along that bucks the population trend, it makes one's arguments seem to lose all credibility. It is far better to take the cautious approach and stay within the bounds of one's data, which includes identifying and discussing potential shortfalls of one's analysis. This problem, of course, is not limited to baseball research, and is something that I also see from time to time among papers that I read as part of my professional work as a biologist.

Despite these criticisms, the scope, readability, and, with a few exceptions, accuracy, of this book cause me to highly recommend Between the Numbers. It serves as a great primer, and a great review, of much of the modern research in baseball, and yet it remains highly readable. Any fan interested in using statistics to understand the game of baseball would be well served by picking up this book and giving it a thorough read. Just be sure to read it with the same critical eye that these authors turn towards the conventional wisdom of baseball.

Book Review: The Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2007

While this point has been made in other reviews, but the thing that impresses me the most about the Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2007 is how different it is from other annual publications. Most annuals provide statistics of the prior season, perhaps with summaries of major happenings within each league or each team. Some of the better ones provide team-by-team analysis and projections for the coming season. And some throw in a few additional, insightful articles about baseball or (often) baseball statistics.

What really sets the Hardball Times Annual apart, and makes it arguably the best of the bunch, is that it focuses on the latter component--insightful articles--far more so than its competitors. There are absolutely stats, which, in fact, are sophisticated, well-organized, and innovative. In addition to classic team and player stats, The Hardball Times makes use of a number of more advanced statistics to analyze both teams and players, including Win Shares, runs created and prevented, defense-independent pitching statistics, and detailed batted-ball statistics. It will be an excellent resource in the coming season, along with the wonderful Hardball Times website.

But the heart of the book lies in the 160 pages of insightful baseball writing by a huge cast of contributors. There is an emphasis in places on the previous season, but much of it is timeless, and will still be worth reading several years down the road. The book also spans a huge range of material, from baseball humor and blunders, to baseball history, to hardcore statistical analysis. In this way, it is more similar to a periodic editorial volume than a classic baseball year-in-review.

The book began with a series of articles recapping the 2006 season. After an introductory article by the always-interesting Dave Studenmund (10 things I learned last year), there was a separate review of the happenings within each division in baseball, as well as a recap of the playoffs. Generally, in each divisional review, each team was recapped for a paragraph or so, with some additional writing to describe how they interacted over the course of the season. The playoff review highlighted each game's major happenings, and did a nice job of summarizing the events as they transpired...though to be honest, I found this whole first section of the book to be the least interesting.

Fortunately, the next section was much better, with eleven short articles of commentary on the 2006 season. Highlights included a dissection how how Walt Jocketty assembled the 2006 St. Louis Cardinals by Brian Tsao, an investigation of the effect of the new drug testing policy on MLB performance by Steve Treder (basically, there wasn't much of a measureable effect), an interesting investigation of competitive balance by Vince Gennaro (he argues that it's only an illusion), and an analysis of the hugely successful Braves General Manager John Schuerholz's approach to his business by Mac Thomason.

From this point on, the articles broadened in scope, focusing less on the 2006 season and more on baseball in general, both in present day and in the past. Here are a few highlights:

• John Brattain describes the initial origins and ultimate downfall of the Federal League. I had only passing familiarity with this league, but it is a remarkable experiment and one wonders what would happen if baseball's anti-trust exemption was dropped and the same thing was tried today.
• There is also a wonderful article by David Gassko on Tommy John Surgery, in which he describes not only the origins and nature of this bizarre surgical procedure, but also its effect on current major league baseball. This "miracle" surgery has not only prolonged the careers of innumerable star-caliber pitchers, but it sometimes might even have improved their abilities.
  
• David Gassko (he is a major contributer to this volume, along with Studes, and for good reason) attempts to evaluate the most valuable (in terms of total career contributions) pitchers of all time. In doing so, he does something that I hadn't seen anyone do prior to this article: he attempts to correct for the competitiveness of baseball. Gassko correctly points out (as others have before him--it's just this is the first I'd seen it) that baseball today almost certainly must be far more competitive now than it was in "the good old days," because a) training and medicine are far better now than they used to be, and, perhaps more importantly, b) the population from which baseball players can be chosen is far larger now than it was before--especially post-integration. Somehow, I never had realized how important integration was to the quality of competition in today's game before reading this article, and the implications of this for interpreting past performances. Gassko has continued this work recently with hitters at THT.com.
  
• John Walsh has a fabulous look at outfield arms, going back to the late 1950's, using his outfield throwing metrics. Some notable Reds that pop up as having excellent arms: Cesar Geronimo, Pete Rose, Paul O'Neill, Ken Griffey Jr., Adam Dunn (earlier in his career, apparently--last season he was below average), and Reggie Sanders.
• Dave Studenmund conducted a very interesting study on what he calls Net Win Shares Value. He used a three-step process. First, he identified the typical payroll cost of a marginal win (a win over the 50-win threshold expected of a team with nothing but replacement players). He then looked at each player's salary, estimated the expected win shares above bench of the player given his salary, and then compared these expected win shares to actual win shares above bench. Finally, he converted this difference to a dollar value to determine the players who provided the most bang for the buck teams spent on them.
  
• Among the Reds, the most valuable players in terms of net win share dollars, were Bronson Arroyo, Aaron Harang, and Dave Ross, while the players who underperformed their salaries the most were Ken Griffey Jr. (by a LOT, due to his high contract and his only modest production), Jason LaRue, and, in third place, Eric Milton.
• Greg Rybarczyk, owner of the fascinating HitTracker website, has a fabulous look at some of the insights that can be gained with more detailed physical data on batted balls. In particular, he looks at how the weather and park effects affected production by both pitchers and batters, and revealed some interesting results. For example, he finds that Arroyo-victim Glendon Rusch was really the victim of insane bad luck last year, with 20 of 21 home runs allowed being hit with a tail wind, pushing them an average of 27 extra feet, and all were at ballparks with high elevations. As a result, he had a disastrous season...but may have actually pitched with skill that would result in a reasonable season: Rybarczyk calculates that Rusch would have allowed only 9 home runs had he pitched under average conditions. Even more striking is his look at how Craig Biggio's home run totals in 2006 were substantially improved by hitting into Minute Maid Park's Crawford boxes in left field.
  
• Dave Studenmund and David Gassko team up in a pair of articles to take a close look at batted balls: their run values, how splits between GB/FB/LD's vary among different sorts of hitters, and the extent to which players have control over their batted ball rates (on the latter point, pitchers have less control than hitters, though pitchers still do have some control, especially of ground ball rates). It's a fascinating pair of studies, and makes me think that much of our future insights into player performance will come from further investigation of batted ball tendencies.

If that sounds jam-packed with information, it is. But surprisingly, despite the quality and detail of the information, it always reads in a manner that was both clear and easy to understand. This was particularly notable in the statistics articles, which did a near-masterful job of both explaining the methodologies while at the same time maintaining readability--it's a fine line, and many other publications stray too far to one side or the other.

Before I close, I will make one point of modest criticism. There is a tendency among some of the studies in this volume to go on what are sometimes (at least in biological research, which is what I do in my day job) called "fishing expeditions": studies in which you run a huge number of statistical tests on a huge number of variables in the same dataset and then go through and try to interpret those that are significant. This is a problem that I often see in baseball research, so I don't mean to single anyone out here. But it can lead to--and, I suspect in some cases, has led to--false positives.

The issue is that significance tests report how often you should find the result that is the observed amount different from the expected result (usually zero difference) just by chance. We typically define 0.05% as a cutoff probability for significance. The problem is that if you run 20 of these tests, all on the same dataset, you should expect to get at least one "significant" result just by chance alone (1/20 = 0.05), even when no difference exists. There are various ways of compensating for this issue, either by using different sorts of statistical methodologies, or by doing an adjustment to your significance cutoff (e.g. the Bonferroni method), but as far as I can tell, these were not employed.

Overall, though, this years' THT Annual offers outstanding value--insightful, innovative, and readable analysis, as well as an excellent selection of detailed and sophisticated statistics, all for a very affordable $20. This was the second year in a row I have purchased this publication, and I was again very impressed with it. There is no annual offseason baseball publication that I will be looking forward to more than next years' THT Annual.

You can purchase The Hardball Times 2007 Annual via amazon.com, or in many local bookstores. I bought mine at Borders. :)

Book Review: Rich Burk's Baseball Scorebook Model BP16-30

Keeping score is something of a lost art, but I find it to be a wonderful way to enjoy a baseball game. It helps me stay on top of every pitch, keep an eye on the big picture, and keep track of everything that happened in a game. What's more, keeping score gives me a record of a game that I can pull out years later should need or curiosity strike me.

When I was growing up, I learned to keep score at Reds games using the scorecard that came with the game program my Dad always bought. But by the time I got to college, I decided it was time to upgrade to a bound scorebook. The only one available at College Book Store in Athens, OH, was C. S. Peterson's Scoremaster (Rawlings)--and I bought every one they had in stock. It had a lot going for it: room to keep track of balls and strikes, play by play space for up to 12 innings, stat totals for all players, scorer notes, nice hard backing... And I've used these books for a number of years and have been pleased with them. But over the past year or two, I've grown a bit frustrated by some of that book's flaws and limitations, and therefore have been looking for a new scorebook for some time. And I finally found one.

A few weeks ago, I happened across a google advertisement for Rich Burk's website. Burk is the play by play announcer for the Portland Beavers, and has recently released his own line of scorebooks. There are a variety of different options on his site, but I decided to buy the one he describes as the "cleanup hitter" of his scorebook line, the BP16-30, which I'm reviewing tonight.

The book opens with an excellent, graphical introduction to scoring and how to use the scorebook. It should serve as a good primer to anyone new to scoring, but is still worth a skim to folks who are more experienced, as Burk has a number of good "advanced tips" that I've already adopted. He also goes into detail on how to use some of the custom features in his book, including his excellent pitch count system. If you follow this link, you can read this introduction and see an example of the scorebook sheets themselves. Below, I'll showcase how I scored part of Sunday, April 15th's game vs. the Cubs. You'll note that I don't do things exactly as Burk does them (everyone has their own style), but that this book allows me to do some things that I wouldn't otherwise be able to do as easily.

We'll start at the top of the page:
Please note that I am only showing the top-of-the-inning page--the facing page has room for the bottom-of-the-inning defense, as well room to list the umpires.

Moving left to right, you can see pitching lines for the home pitchers (note that there is room for six pitchers--my old scorebook only had room for three), defensive charts for the home team, and a scoreboard for the game. I've never had either of the latter two features before, and I really like them. The defensive charts perhaps aren't necessary, but they might be nice to have, especially when I'm at a live game and don't have the benefit of an announcer to remind me who's who.

The heart of any scorebook, of course, is the play by play space:
We'll start at the left and work right. First, we see the list of players in the batting order. Note that there's plenty of space to write in substitutions or notes. Next is an interesting feature that allows you to write in relevant statistics prior to the start of the game. It's set up for AVG, HR, RBI, and SB/CS. I didn't write anything in here because I was watching the game on TiVO and didn't want to risk spoiling the game by logging onto a stats site. But I can definitely see doing this prior to driving out to the ballpark, though I'd probably substitute OBP and SLG for AVG and RBI...might also be nice to have PA instead of HR, just to keep track of sample size...but hey, I'm a geek.

Next we get to the inning columns. If we start in the first inning, we can see that Ryan Freel struck out swinging ("K") to start the game. Perhaps the best part of this scorebook, however, is also highlighted here--the pitch tracking system. To the left of Ryan's "K" are two columns: the left signifies balls, while the right signifies strikes. Each row represents a different pitch in the sequence. Here, we can see that Freel took the first pitch for a strike (the dot in the first row), and then fouled off two pitches (I'm using a diagonal slash to indicate fouls) before swinging and missing.

Phillips, the #2 hitter, had a more interesting at-bat. After swinging and missing at the first two pitches (I use a horizontal slash for a swing and miss), Phillips took a ball, fouled off a pitch, and then took another ball before flying out to center field. My old scorebook would let me show he had a 2-2 count when he hit the fly ball, but it wasn't easy to show that he battled back from being down 0-2. This sort of detail is fun to track (for me, at least), can quickly help you identify great at-bats, yet is usually not as easy to track in traditional scorebooks. I love this system: simple, easy to read and use, yet very powerful.

Let's move over to the fourth inning to highlight another novel feature, the RBI dots. Here's how they work: each dot represents an RBI at a different base, starting with home at the left and third at the right. A slash through a dot means a runner was left on base following an at-bat, while a circled dot represents an RBI. Here, we see that Hamilton struck out looking with Phillips on second base (Brandon stole second on the 6th pitch of the at-bat), leaving him on base with one out (note the slash through the "2B" dot). Fortunately, Jeff Conine came through with a "clutch" single on a 3-2 count (it was actually a run and hit play, though I haven't worked out a good way to note that), driving him home (circled "2B" dot). Junior and EdE subsequently struck out, stranding Conine at second (his SB bordered on defensive indifference, but I think that's a silly rule and gave him a SB--the official scorer did too). Note that the clean nature of this scorebook's cells allowed me to take some notes on Eddie's unfortunate K, as well as other interesting pitches and at-bats.

The other nice aspect of the pitch tracking system in this scorebook is that it makes it very easy to keep track of pitch counts for pitchers. This next section falls just below the inning columns:
Here you can see Ted Lilly's pitch counts, inning by inning. They went up remarkably fast considering that there were next to zero baserunners most of the night (10 strikeouts can push up your pitch count, of course), and he ultimately exited the game at 101 pitches (63 strikes, 38 balls) at the end of the 6th inning. I'm not showing it, but below this section is a fairly standard place to note runs, hits, errors, and men left on base.

There are a few additional features of this scorebook worth mentioning: it has a unique design in which there is a middle sheet that you flip back and forth between innings:
I find this to be a rather ingenious solution that allows all the detail that is jammed into the play by play section, as well as a full 16 innings worth of space for those extra inning games, and yet still manages to keep all the data for each game in one place. The only drawback is that you actually have to do the cutting yourself.

Following the game pages is a 5-page baseball glossary. There are a few minor omissions (e.g. infield fly rule, hit and run play, etc), but overall it's a good, concise, and readable dictionary of common baseball terms and plays--most of what you see on the field in a game can be explained by it. This would be a really nice resource to have available for someone who was learning the basics of the game.

I do have a few modest critiques. First, I have some questions about how durable this book will be. I'm not particularly kind to my scorebooks as I trek them to and from the ballpark. While the paper it is printed on is certainly not cheap or flimsy, and the spiral binding seems fine, my old scorebook seems a bit sturdier. This new book also doesn't have a hard back cover, which will make a clipboard a necessity when scoring at a ballpark--or even on the couch. I appreciate that this is a consequence of the limitations of publishing on Lulu, but it is still a factor worth considering.

Second, there are no stat lines for the batters. This isn't a big deal for me, as I honestly didn't bother to fill them out for most games with my old book. But some people enjoy doing this, and admittedly it is nice to be able to look back and immediately see who got hits, walks, etc in a game. Furthermore, some individuals who keep score little league or softball teams might be charged with keeping player stats, and even Burk's line of amateur league scorebooks meant for those types of games (more than 9 batters, for example) do not have stat lines for batters. This, of course, is a space issue. But I'm a bit surprised that none of his models offer this feature.

Finally, there is not a good place near the top of the page to give title information about the game. If one was a broadcaster and scored every game for one particular team, that wouldn't be a big deal, as there is a place to write in the date and game number near the bottom of the page. But if you're like me and score only ~10-20 games a year, you might find it necessary to write in your own title to make the game easier to find (see the first image above, "Cincinnati Reds @ Chicago Cubs"). Admittedly, of course, this particular model is geared towards broadcasters, which may be why the title line isn't there.

Despite these quibbles, I'm delighted with this new scorebook. Games I score come out much cleaner and less cramped than they did before thanks to the large & clean format, and I absolutely love the pitch tracking features. At $16.99 + shipping, it may seem a bit expensive for a scorebook (quote from my wife: "you paid $20 for book that doesn't even have anything in it??!?"). For me, though, it's worth it: this book not only provides me with all the features I was looking for, but it also provides a few new tools than let me score a baseball game more effectively than ever before. Highly recommended.

Click here to view Rich Burk's entire line of scorebooks, or here to preview and purchase the BP16-30 via Lulu.com.