November 12, 2004
Book in the Mail
My copy of the Bill James Handbook 2005 arrived in the mail today. Although I worked on the publication, this is the first time I've seen the finished product, and the first time I've seen the Bill James sections of the book. If you are a fan of the Abstracts, you'll want to pick a copy up to see how and why Bill has updated the runs created formula. He has a whole section on efficient teams that came from the realization that the Red Sox have been an inefficient team for nearly two decades. In trying to figure out why, Bill revised the runs created formula by adjusting the advancement part of the formula, making the weights for hits non-integer. This has the nice effect of making the formula more accurate for teams going back to 1955.
One of the other new sections is by Sig Mejdal. Sig is a biomathematician who works for NASA (not a rocket scientist, but close). Sig is doing extremely interesting work using stepwise logistic time series regression to try to determine the probability of a player being injured given his history and body type. I hope interview Sig about his work more over the winter.
If you're interested, follow the link above to purchase a copy. You won't be disappointed.
Posted by David Pinto at
03:05 PM
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I'm first. I bought one.
Larry
My arrived Thursday.
People who buy this book should realize it has very little text but instead it mostly consists of statistics. Obviously I still like it but keep that in mind if you've never seen the book and are acting on someone else's recommendation.
The Sig Mejdal section sounds incredible. I have just began reading about the possibilities for finite element analysis in terms of biomechanics, and it sounds like Mejdal might be using an aspect of this for injury predictions. Can anyone confirm or deny?