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8 new baseball books to carry you through spring training

Check out these recent books about America's pastime.

6. ‘The Bill James Handbook 2015,’ by Bill James

  • By Ross Atkin

Here’s a book by one of the foremost pioneers of sports analytics and an adviser to the Boston Red Sox. "The Bill James Handbook 2015" delivers the complete up-to-date statistics on every major league player. Mixed in among the reams of stats are some of James’s insights and conclusions about what the data indicate. 

Here's an excerpt from the book:

“Three years ago I developed a way to rank starting pitchers so as to determine who is the World’s #1 Starting Pitcher. That may be poorly stated; a blind Yugoslavian rugby fan with no computer could determine who is the World’s #1 Starting Pitcher at this moment. What’s fun about it is not Who’s #1, it’s the list. Tennis has a great list; Golf has a great list. I don’t care who is the world’s #47 ranked golfer at this moment, or any moment, but if I cared, I could go check. 

“I care about baseball players. I care about Zack Greinke, and David Price, and Matt Cain, and Cole Hamels, and Stephen Strasburg, and Yu Darvish You, and Gio Gonzalez and Bud Norris and Brandon McCarthy. I always wonder how one guy stacks up against the next. The structure of the baseball schedule invites us to wonder. Let’s say there is a game tomorrow, and Sonny Gray is matched up against Garrett Richards. Who’s got the edge? How big is the edge? Who do you like?”

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

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