Book Review
Ron Shandler's 2006 Baseball Forecaster
By Mike SanClemente - Managing Editor
01/24/2006
Isn’t this a bit crazy?
What book would instruct Gustavo Chacin owners to trade him now because his value and output might never be higher? The kid’s a rookie, wouldn’t his value only go up from here?
What advisor would directly imply that Roman Colon’s 2006 season could easily be better than Jesse Crain’s? Colon’s pedigree is nowhere near Crain’s.
Jesse Crain
Who mentions that despite a slowly improving batting average over the past 5 years that Royce Clayton could “completely fall off the map” this year?
Ron Shandler in his Baseball Forecaster, that’s who.
And that’s only from players with last names beginning with the letter C.
If you’re a numbers nerd like me – and the fact that you’ve visited Stratogists.com strongly suggests that you are – then you know your stats cold. You visit sites, buy different books, crunch your own stats and make your own interpretations.
And with so many opinions out there, it’s not often that you stumble upon a new one, or one that uses a different approach.
Enter Shandler’s Baseball Forecaster.
AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT
Shandler and his team of writers slice and dice big league action in ways that make my head spin. Using stats few others care to notice, like fly ball percentages, contact rate, stolen base opportunities taken, and pitcher ratings for control and dominance, this book is able to draw conclusions others don’t.
Think about that for a minute. If I have access to data that you don’t, it doesn’t guarantee that my conclusion will be right and yours wrong. However, it does provide me with a perspective that you won’t even see, putting me in the driver’s seat and you in the trunk.
In the avalanche of numbers that has become major league baseball, there’s a lot of noise, or needless info. Some of it, like most of what comes out of the mouth of former athletes (Joe Morgan, Harold Reynolds, Ryne Sandberg, John Kruk, and Jack McDowell immediately leap to mind) are even worse than useless; they’re distractingly detrimental because they’re so often incorrect.
Newsroom personalities are alone. In a few months, baseball announcers across the nation will begin to say things like “Benchwarmer Joe is 3 for 8 as a pinchhitter this year, good for a .375 batting average. That’s pretty impressive, right Bob?” Again, with the Sample Size Police siren wailing, most broadcasters offer a cacophony of statistical sounds against the sweet music of the Baseball Forecaster.
Shandler has been doing his bit since 1986, and his track record suggests his methods are far from madness. He’s been employed by the St. Louis Cardinals for several years now, and his book sales continue to grow, as does his staff of writers.
STEP BY STEP
The authors walk you through ways to evaluate players on your own, then offer their own stat layout and opinions of each one. Discussions of forecasting risk are followed by a Batting Toolbox, showing which stats are leading indicators of future offensive performance, and why.
The Major League Equivalents (MLE) section is so highly regarded that Bill James asked to use it in his book, and does something I’d like to see more of in the stats world: TWO season’s worth of information rather than one. This book lists each player’s 2005 MLE just beneath his 2004 MLE, making a nice way to compare seasons. Especially when a player has been injured or recently saw a huge spike in performance, showing two years is far more valuable than just one.
Injuries? There’s help here too. One section verbally discusses the status of individual players who were hurt in 2005, and another list shows days on the DL from 2001 to 2005. Again, this book shows its edge here: this DL info is available to probably anyone, but not only does it appear in few places, most times it only displays current year data (which is not helpful when you’re trying to acquire Troy Glaus, zero DL days last year, but 174 in the prior two).
Lastly, as I flew from LA to San Francisco this past weekend, I expected to scan more of the book while on the plane. I’ve had his book for a month, and still haven’t read through it all, because there is so much good information to get through.
It didn’t happen. The entire flight I was stuck on one section I hadn’t discovered: a pitching breakdown that analyzes starts in a way no other book does, to my knowledge. Pure Quality Starts is a methodology that tries to predict future starting pitcher performance by charting every start and assigning a rating of 0 through 5 for each one, with a focus on disastrous starts (ratings of 0 or 1) and dominant ones (ratings of 4 or 5).
I wish this section split out first half vs. second half, but nevertheless it does a good job of – you guessed it – displaying multiple years, in this case 2003, 2004 and 2005, enabling the reader to grasp trends that one year of info just can’t provide.
Articles on pitching streaks, groundball effects, and the role of skill and luck in starting pitching represent part of the remainder of the book.
CONCLUSION
I know I gave this book a pretty strong sell here; is it perfect? No book is. This one is fantasy-oriented, which means it’s strongly geared towards whatever a given player will produce next season. This focus tends to put younger players at a disadvantage, which you’ll see reflected in the individual player writeups.
However, for what it does, it certainly does it well. If you’re interested in adding this book’s conclusions to your arsenal, visit http://www.baseballforecaster.com.