[ARETE] Phillips, Scouting and Scoring

[Duncan Jamieson]

All,
Keeping in mind I am almost completely computer illiterate (incompetent?),
hopefully you will find below and attached Tim Morris's review of
Phillips. *Scouting
and Scoring*.
Here goes:

Scouting and Scoring

Reviewed by Tim Morris, University of Texas at Arlington



A book on the history of record-keeping in baseball might not seem in the
wheelhouse of Princeton University Press, but Princeton has been interested
lately in qualitative studies of the data that increasingly guide all
decision-making.  *Scouting and Scoring* is thus well in line with a recent
Princeton title like Jerry Muller’s *Tyranny of Metrics* (2018).  Author
Christopher Phillips argues that “we have to think more carefully about how
[people] create data” (5).

Books on the new data sciences characteristically spend little or no time
discussing the human labor by which data are made. … The belief … is that
with enough sophistication in processing and analyzing, any faults or
improprieties in collection can be managed. (5)

In mathematical terms, that may be so.  But Phillips, via baseball,
observes how the stuff we think we’ve reduced to pure numbers is often a
mess of judgment calls.

            *Scouting and Scoring* is a definitive study of one aspect of
baseball history, or perhaps parahistory (not in an occult sense; but
scouts and scorers are not the game proper).  Phillips does not really make
baseball records a platform for larger critiques of how we generate and
analyze data.  He sticks to careful documentation of how baseball has
arrived at its exemplary statistical archives.

            Baseball is often invoked as an ideal case of the reduction of
human activity to measurable quanta.  Baseball’s discrete units of play
lend themselves to tabulation, and those tabulations can provide real
insights that feed back into better strategies and tactics.  Baseball
statistics seem so transparently “given” (the root sense of “data”) that we
rarely think about them.  But take a double, for instance, a baseball event
that Phillips frequently invokes.  The batter hits the ball and ends up on
second base: what could be clearer?  But recording a double depends on a
decision made by the official scorer.  Some significant part of the time,
the scorer must decide whether it was a double or a two-base error; whether
it was a double or a single where the batter-runner advanced to second on a
throw.  How do we know a given event occurred, till someone actively
decides it did?
            And how do major-leaguers get to the majors to hit those
maybe-doubles?  At some point, before a major-league prospect accumulates a
reliable statistical record, he must be judged directly by a scout.  Thanks
to the film *Moneyball*, even more than Michael Lewis’ book, people often
see stats and scouts as using diametrically opposite worldviews.  But
Phillips shows how, within the scouting fraternity, there has been a
constant drive through the years to objectify and standardize qualitative
observations.

            The audience for *Scouting and Scoring* is likely to be limited
to people who already know a good deal of the history it conveys – those
most interested would even know some of the people that Phillips mentions
as involved in the rise of sabermetric data-gathering.  The sections on
both scoring and scouting are a little abstruse even for me, and I would
seem within the target audience.  But via some extrapolation, I think many
readers could draw useful insights from Phillips’ book.  Statistics on the
economy, crime, trade, immigration, and healthcare – any of the key issues
of our time, or any time – are generated by methods analogous to those that
Phillips painstakingly documents for baseball.  Numbers are made, not
found: which is not to say they are fabricated, only that they must be the
result of judgment calls, like those made by scorers and scouts.  In an era
when we turn to statistics to validate ideologies or even morality, we
should be more aware of how those statistics come to be.



Phillips, Christopher J. Scouting and Scoring: How We Know What We Know
about Baseball. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. 301 pp.
Hardcover, $27.95.


Remember to smell the roses as you recumber past

Duncan R. Jamieson, Ph. D.
Professor of History
Book Review Editor
*AETHLON: The Journal of Sport Literature*
Ashland University
Ashland, OH  44805
USA
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