Baseball Book Review: It Ain’t Over Til It’s Over
Since it’s the offseason and there’s lot of holidays and y’know time to do other stuff besides be a slave at the digital plantation also known as AOL, I’ll be doing baseball book reviews every couple of weeks.
First time around, I’ll look at the latest offering from the stat geeks at Baseball Prospectus, titled It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over. As you might guess by the title this book, the third from the BP crew (500-page annual excepted), is about pennant races.
It’s unique in a couple of ways for Baseball Prospectus. First, it’s a historical book. It deals with past events, things that have already happened rather than recent events and team-building (Mind Game) or theoretical questions about the game (Baseball Between the Numbers).
In a way, that frees their writers in one fashion. It removes them from the minutiae of many of their advanced metrics, which often are better utilized as a predictor of future success than past spoils. For the less technical reader that makes the pages a lot easier to turn.
Unfortunately, the decreased reliance on advanced metrics also seems to result in a decreased amount of groundbreaking or innovative information, and, after all, that’s really why you read a book by Baseball Prospectus anyway.
It’s broken into 13 chapters — 13 different pennant races. It’s filled with some good historical details and it makes for a good crash course in pennant-race history, but I ultimately found myself disappointed. The few sabermetric lessons I learned just didn’t satiate me.