I greatly enjoyed Moskowitz and Wertheim's Scorecasting. Much like the highly successful Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (P.S.), the authors examine some of the preconceptions surrounding sport, using statistics and other empirical evidence to reach some interesting conclusions. As the authors stated in their forward, they hope this book will be used to start conversations, settle bar bets, and generally entertain the thinking sportsman. I think they have succeeded.
By and large, Scorecasting is highly readable. My one critique would be that the chapters a highly variable in length, and in particular some of the shorter chapters seemed to be just tossed in. (Did we really need 4 pages to show that, indeed, the Yankees win because they have the biggest payroll in baseball? Three pages to show that the coin toss at the start of NFL overtime is important?) I would also point out that, again like Freakonomics, the chapters are unconnected by any underlying theme, unless that theme is to examine preconceptions and use evidence. I don't consider that a flaw, more a notation of what type of book this is.
In addition, I was reminded of my favorite sports book, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. Just as a large part of Moneyball was devoted to showing how a systematic statistical approach to building a team could lead to better results than traditional scouting, Scorecasting can give a reader an appreciation of some recurring trends in sport. It is not just descriptive, but predictive. (The one thing that sets Moneyball apart is that is also has the very compelling story of Oakland A's manager Billy Beane woven in. That human element is absent in Scorecasting.)
Some quick examples from chapters I enjoyed:
Why you should (almost) never punt in football, including an example of a coach who followed the philosophy to a state title. Also, why most coaches still punt, in spite of the evidence.
Why Tim Duncan's 149 blocked shots are more valuable than Dwight Howard's 232 (Answer: Duncan tends to block the ball to his teammates, Howard tends toward the spectacular swat that goes into the 4th row...then back to the other team.)
The incredible differences in strike zones when comparing a 3-0 count to a 0-2 count. (Hint: umps expand the zone in the former, shrink the zone in the latter, allowing the hitter to determine the outcome)
So, if you are a sports fan, a bit of a stats geek, and enjoy a well thought out contrarian argument, this is a 5 star book. If you generally enjoyed the other two books I mentioned, I think this would be a good choice.
4.5 stars overall
This latest addition in the Freakonomics-driven behavioral economics genre is probabaly the best. It is Scorecasting and to a sports fan it is a can't-put-down type of book. The book is written extremely well with a mixture of famous sporting anecdotes and hard statistics that include research of the authors and others.
Some of the eye-opening subject include:
1. very solid evidence that umpires bias games however what is interesting is the bias is not random. The bias tells a story.
2. the subject of home-field advantage was mesmerizing. Turns out not at all what sports pundits tells us are true or at least not in the way you might think so.
3. incentives lie at the heart of the Chicago Cubs dismal century.
4. great use of numbers to show how desperate baseball players are to have a batting average of at least 0.300.
5. a look into why some stats are not telling us all we need to know (i.e. blocked shot stats in basketball).
6. why don't football coaches go for it on 4th down when it is a statistically correct move?
Turns out that psychology (namely loss aversion) and incentives dictate a lot of sports decision making.
There are several shorter chapters that seem to be 'unfinished' which is a shame. For instance a chapter just mentions the Yankees 'buying' of championships. It would have been great to see a more in depth statistical analysis of how spending money predicts success in baseball.
As I hear constantly on the sport talk radio, the Seattle Seahawks benefit from their 12th man the crowd. It would have been interesting to see if this claim stacks up and is in fact a larger effect on winning than at other venues.
Great, fast read. Highly recommended.
Buy Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won Now
Scorecasting solves many puzzles on both a microand macro scale...
that sports fans have wondered about for years.
For example, when baseball home plate umpires have made an obvious mistake in calling
a ball or strike do they then try and fix that mistake by making a call the "other way?"
(The research done by the authors of Scorecasting reveal that it does indeed happen.)
Another example: When do ref's throw flags in football? Early in the game or late
in the game? Why? You'll find out.
On a bigger scale, why is there a home field advantage in sports? We can understand
the Boston Red Sox....but why the Indianapolis Colts or other teams that play in
domed stadiums, say, in football. It turns out that you will likely be shocked to find
out this answer and because the home team wins around 53% of the time in baseball vs.
about 69% of the time in College Football, what you learn will change the way you
look at the game forever.
In the book, Stumbling on Wins, we found out that coaches aren't as important as
we once thought they were. That was a bit of a jaw dropper. In Scorecasting the authors
go further and deeper explaining why coaches tend to be so interchangable...it turns
out they all are programmed by the pressure of the fans and industry itself to
call plays that are very predictable ...even when they are the wrong choice...such as
punting in many fourth down situations.
It turns out that punting on fourth down IS the right decision often enough but it is
the wrong decision so often that coaches would win a lot more games for their team
if they went for it on fourth and X. So why not? Because not all coaches have job
security and losing a game or two because of a couple of fourth and two calls could cost
a coach his job. No one will be getting fired for punting on fourth down.
And the revelations go deeper and deeper up and down the scale...
You'll find out the difference betweeen the strike zone in baseball when a hitter is
3-0 vs. when the hitter is 0-2. Turns out the difference is enormous and the authors
reveal precisely what a hitter should do 3 0 and what a hitter should do 0 2.
Ah...and then there are the Chicago Cubs. I grew up visiting Wrigley Field on opening
day year after year. Each year hope sprang eternal...and today 35 years later...I'm still
hoping...why haven't the Cubs WON? It is a painful but enlightening read that every
fan will appreciate.
Scorecasting is densely detailed. It is a compelling read and offers a great deal
of wisdom for fans, coaches and players. You'll never look at a game quite the same way
after you've had your eyes opened to what ELSE is really going on.
Brilliant!
Kevin Hogan, Author
The Science of Influence: How to Get Anyone to Say "Yes" in 8 Minutes or Less!
Read Best Reviews of Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won Here
This book claims to show hidden influences behind sports. For this to be successful, the arguments must be non-obvious (or they would hardly be "hidden") and new, and at least plausibly true. The book has at best mixed success.
Much of the material is pretty standard stuff. Any sports fan with any interest in analysis has likely seen discussions of how in American football icing a kicker doesn't work, or why coaches should go for it on fourth down more than they do. I know as little about basketball as it is possible for an American sports fan to, but I have read multiple analyses showing that players in foul trouble should be left in more than they are. Any book breathlessly claiming to reveal what is hidden would do well to avoid the commonplace.
Then there is the issue of the plausibility. There is a short section "How Competitive are Competitive Sports?: Why are the Pittsburgh Steelers so successful and the Pittsburgh Pirates so unsuccessful?" I was expecting a discussion of salary caps and revenue sharing and local versus national television deals, and perhaps the relative readiness of a player just out of college to contribute at the top professional level in football and baseball. What I got was much, much less: the observations the Pirates have a small payroll (with the briefest of nods to the absence of a salary cap in baseball) and that the long baseball season precludes a bad team from getting into the playoffs, much less winning the World Series. This is hopelessly inadequate even taking it on its own shallow terms. The question is why a small market like Pittsburgh can field a successful team in the NFL but not MLB. Taking the explanation at face value, they are saying that the Steelers just got lucky, but the long season prevents the Pirates from getting similarly lucky. This is beyond superficial. It is simply embarrassing, and the book's editor should be ashamed of letting this through.
The book's big ticket item is the explanation for home field advantage: why are home teams in various sports more likely to win than are visiting teams? They devote two large sections to this, which combine for about a quarter of the book.
They assign part of the advantage specifically in the NHL and NBA to scheduling, with visiting teams more likely than home teams to be forced to play games on consecutive days. But the general cause across sports (and predominant even in hockey and basketball), they argue, is crowd effects: not on the players, but on the referees. Furthermore, this effect is stronger when the crowd is larger or closer to the officials. Unfortunately, the argument is seriously flawed.
The argument that crowds don't affect the players is based on various discrete individual acts which can be separated out for analysis: free throws in basketball, field goal attempts in American football, penalty kicks in soccer, and so forth. They show that whether these take place at home or on the road make no difference. But it is a logical leap to conclude that this holds for collective team efforts. The obvious counter-example is crowd noise in American football. It is widely believed that by making noise, the fans can interfere with an opposing quarterback communicating with his teammates. It is a curious thing that the authors don't address this. There might be a good argument for generalizing individual effects to the team as a whole, but the authors don't make it. They merely assume it.
Their strongest work is the demonstration of crowd effects influencing officials' calls. I found both interesting and persuasive the evidence that a home plate umpire's strike zone expands and contracts depending on which side is at bat. But there is no support beyond handwaving that this fully explains home field advantage. We are assured that the authors have performed calculations showing that this is true, but no hint of what these calculations were. The book is intended for a general readership, but they could have put in a technical appendix, or at least a URL for a webpage showing their work.
The bigger problem is that the conclusion doesn't fit the facts. They mostly treat attendance as if it were a constant within a given sport. They acknowledge that bad teams tend to have low attendance, assure us that the math all works out, and drop the subject. But attendance is not a constant, even within a sport. Major league baseball games nowadays average over 30,000 per game. In the 1970s they averaged about half that. (And the umpires were further away from the crowd in those multi-purpose donut stadiums.) A hundred years ago they averaged around a fifth of the modern number. Modern minor league games average about a tenth the attendance of modern MLB games. If, as they authors argue, referee bias correlates to crowd size and referee bias is the source of home field advantage, it should follow that the home field advantage correlates with the average attendance. Do minor league games have a lower home field advantage? Heck if I know. The authors don't address it, or give any indication that they are aware that such a thing as minor league baseball even exists. But they do address home field advantage in baseball since 1903. They point out that it has remained constant. They seem to think that this supports their argument, apparently not knowing how much average attendance has changed across the decades. But it actually disproves the thesis.
They clearly are onto something. The discussion of referee bias is interesting and persuasive as far as it goes. But the claim that they have solved the problem of home field advantage simply does not stand up to scrutiny.
All in all this looks like the middle draft of a better book. This should have been the draft they sent off to friends and associates who could be trusted to read the manuscript with a skeptical eye and point out the holes. Instead they sent it off to the printers. The result is a book with some interesting material, but the unwary reader is likely to come away from it knowing less than he did going in.
Want Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won Discount?
While I am an avid reader and more than willing to share my thoughts about the books I read on the pages of Bookreporter, I am rarely willing to join book groups or literary discussions about what I read. This may be the result of many bad experiences in high school and college when I was unwilling to participate in discussions about books that held little interest for me. The years have passed, I now read what I want, and I have finally found a book that cries out for the creation of a discussion group. SCORECASTING by Tobias Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim may be the most thought-provoking sports book I have ever read. I want to purchase a dozen copies and pass them out to my sports-loving friends so we may meet over beer and wings to discuss and debate what the book tells us about what we think we know about sports and what the numbers actually tell us.
Moskowitz and Wertheim are an eclectic duo. Wertheim has a sports background as a writer for Sports Illustrated. Moskowitz is a professor of finance at the University of Chicago. They are not jocks writing from their on-field experience. Instead, they use concrete numerical studies and economic analysis to make a strong case for theories that at first blush seem unorthodox.
Forget all you have been taught about conventional sports strategy. Want to know how to improve your chances to win football games? Stop punting on fourth down and start going for a first down. Don't talk to me about field position, read what the authors have to say. They cite an economics paper by David Romer suggesting that the play-calling of NFL teams shows "systematic and clear-cut" departures from decisions that would maximize winning. Coaches should more aggressively go for first downs on fourth down but fail to do so almost 90% of the time. While the four-down game plan may not be popular in the NFL, the authors cite high school power Central Arkansas Christian and its multiple state championships in support of the "go for it" strategy.
Moskowitz and Wertheim identify how individual behavior is directly related to what happens on athletic fields in all sports and at all levels. Loss aversion is an economic principle that refers to people's tendency to strongly prefer avoiding losses to acquiring gains. Loss aversion abounds in sports, explaining why a professional golfer facing a five-foot putt is more likely to make the putt for par than for birdie. It explains why pitchers throw strikes on a 3-0 count and balls on an 0-2 count. It is a pervasive principle in sports, often with a negative impact on winning.
Provocative insights can be found on page after page of SCORECASTING. Space prevents me from giving attention to many of the authors' findings except to briefly mention them. But here are a few to whet your appetite: The notion of the "hot hand'" is a myth as is the belief in the home field advantage; Does icing a kicker work?; Are NFL draft choices overrated? Chapter after chapter, page after page, the book's conclusions will astound you.
One small criticism must be mentioned. Moskowitz and Wertheim, long-suffering Chicago Cub fans, devote the final chapter of their book to seeking an answer as to whether their beloved Cubs are cursed. In this effort, they perpetuate the myth of Steve Bartman. The Bartman play came in the eighth inning of a playoff game when the Cubs were five outs from advancing to the World Series. SCORECASTING suggests that Bartman interfered with a catchable fly ball, and as a result the Cubs lost the game. Sorry gentlemen, it did not happen that way. It is a myth that grows with the passage of time, much like the notion that Al Gore claimed to invent the Internet.
As a longtime White Sox fan, I will cut the authors some slack because the rest of the book more than overcomes this one tiny blemish. It cannot and must not detract from the simple fact that this is a book every sports fan must read.
--Reviewed by Stuart Shiffman
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