Jim Albert’s Baseball Stats Book Scores a Home Run

In the current World Series, the venerable N. Y. Yankees teeter on the edge of greatness, with the possibility of being four-time series winners, for the third time in their history. Their challengers, the upstart Arizona Diamondbacks, seek to prevent that from happening. Yet the Seattle Mariners, with the best record in baseball this year, have already been eliminated. So will the “best team” really win? A recent book by Jim Albert, mathematics and statistics, may help fans determine whether the winner is indeed the best team in baseball, and looks at the likelihood that an average team will excel in the post-season.

Albert’s book, Curve Ball: Baseball, Statistics and the Role of Chance in the Game, which he wrote with co-author Jay Bennett, has made quite a hit in the media and with baseball fans. The book has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, on WGN in Chicago and on a Dayton National Public Radio station, and is doing well on Amazon.com. Curve Ball was published in June by Copernicus Books, an imprint of Springer-Verlag.

“We were very happy with how well received it’s been. For us, the excitement was just in writing it,” Albert said.

Albert and Bennett, both statisticians and loyal Philadelphia Phillies fans, have endeavored to help make baseball statistics more understandable and to enable people to use statistics to learn about the game, which has had a long and storied use of statistics to describe teams and players. Yet, Albert said, many people don’t have a good grasp of how statistics work, or may misinterpret them. They also tend to overlook the role chance plays in the game.

When a player follows an outstanding month with a so-so period of play, for example, people tend to believe he is in a “slump,” when in actuality he is simply following a natural tendency to go toward the average, according to Albert. “People tend to focus on the extremes,’ he said.

Likewise, if someone gets 10 hits out of 20 times at bat, he appears to have a very good batting average. But in statistical terms, 20 at-bats is not nearly enough upon which to base a sound judgment.

“Even an entire season, of 500-600 at-bats, is not quite enough in statistical terms,” Albert said.

Baseball and all its statistics have long fascinated scientists. The eminent scientist and author Stephen Jay Gould, Albert pointed out, writes a chapter in Full House in which he makes the case that it is very unlikely that any player will ever hit for a batting average of .400. Ted Williams was the last player to hit for an average of .400 in a single season. Gould feels players’ abilities are growing closer all the time, and uses statistics to make his case. Despite Gould’s conjecture, Albert is not sure how long Barry Bonds’ recent record of 73 home runs will remain. Players are getting stronger, pitching is relatively weak, and Albert believes that many current players have the potential to break Bonds’ record.

Another goal in writing the book, Albert said, was to promote statistics as a major field of study for American students.

“Most of our Ph.D. students in statistics today are from other countries. We wanted to show people how statistics can be used in life and that it’s an interesting career,” he said.

Both Albert and Bennett, who is principal scientist with Telcordia Technologies and editor of “Statistics in Sport,” have served as chair of the Sports Section of the American Statistical Association.

Albert is at work on a resource book for statistics faculty designed to help them “spice up their statistics class” using baseball as a teaching tool.