Necessary Roughness

The Baseball Economist: The Real Game Exposed by J.C. Bradbury caters to much the same audience as Moneyball. Instead of looking at the economics of managing one team, Bradbury applies his economics expertise to other questions within the game of baseball.

Some conclusions defy the conventional wisdom in an entertaining fashion. Warning both benches after the time a pitcher hits a batter actually increases rather than decreases the chance of a batter being hit, because the chance of retaliation is taken away. Major League Baseball may be a monopoly, but it really doesn’t behave like one.

Statistics are employed heavily to determine other things, such as judging the worth of hitters and pitchers. This is why the middle of the book is a little difficult to the common reader, and the temptation is to skip ahead to see what the answers are. Where “conventional wisdom” employs a person’s batting average to show how good a person is, Bradbury prefers adding the on-base percentage and the slugging percentage to get a better measure. For pitchers, he eschews the earned run average for a DISP ERA that uses strikeouts, walks, and homers — statistics that aren’t affected by the defense performance of the other players on the team. The book finishes strong in its discussion of the MLB “multi-price monopoly,” which allows it to maximize profit without restricting quantity.

Bradbury isn’t as offended as some by the use of steroids in baseball, in part because steroids are used to help players recover and also because others, especially pitchers, use other performance-enhancing methods such as elective “tommy john” surgery.

If you’re a Royals fan, the author provides numbers to back up your opinion that the front office has been severely underperforming.

If you like Moneyball, Economist is more numerically intensive and a little tougher to read. The results are worth it. Bradbury’s analysis of incentives in baseball is worth the price of the book, especially if you check it out of your local library like I did.