<div dir="ltr"><div>All, <br></div><div>Keeping in mind I am almost completely computer illiterate (incompetent?), hopefully you will find below and attached Tim Morris's review of Phillips. <i>Scouting and Scoring</i>.</div><div>Here goes:</div><div>
<p class="gmail-MsoNormalCxSpFirst" style="line-height:200%"><span style="font-family:Palatino">Scouting and Scoring<span></span></span></p>
<p class="gmail-MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height:200%"><span style="font-family:Palatino">Reviewed by Tim Morris, University of Texas at Arlington<span></span></span></p>
<p class="gmail-MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height:200%"><span style="font-family:Palatino"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="gmail-MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-indent:0.5in;line-height:200%"><span style="font-family:Palatino">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.<span> </span><i>Scouting and Scoring</i> is thus well in
line with a recent Princeton title like Jerry Muller’s <i>Tyranny of Metrics</i> (2018).<span>
</span>Author Christopher Phillips argues that “we have to think more carefully
about how [people] create data” (5).<span></span></span></p>
<p class="gmail-MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left:0.5in;line-height:200%"><span style="font-family:Palatino">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)<span></span></span></p>
<p class="gmail-MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height:200%"><span style="font-family:Palatino">In mathematical terms, that may be so.<span> </span>But Phillips, via baseball, observes how the
stuff we think we’ve reduced to pure numbers is often a mess of judgment calls.<span></span></span></p>
<p class="gmail-MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height:200%"><span style="font-family:Palatino"><span> </span><i>Scouting and Scoring</i> 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).<span>
</span>Phillips does not really make baseball records a platform for larger
critiques of how we generate and analyze data.<span>
</span>He sticks to careful documentation of how baseball has arrived at its
exemplary statistical archives.<span></span></span></p>
<p class="gmail-MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height:200%"><span style="font-family:Palatino"><span> </span>Baseball is often
invoked as an ideal case of the reduction of human activity to measurable
quanta.<span> </span>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.<span> </span>Baseball statistics seem so transparently
“given” (the root sense of “data”) that we rarely think about them.<span> </span>But take a double, for instance, a baseball
event that Phillips frequently invokes.<span>
</span>The batter hits the ball and ends up on second base: what could be
clearer?<span> </span>But recording a double depends
on a decision made by the official scorer.<span>
</span>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.<span>
</span>How do we know a given event occurred, till someone actively decides it
did?<br>
<span> </span>And how do major-leaguers get
to the majors to hit those maybe-doubles?<span>
</span>At some point, before a major-league prospect accumulates a reliable
statistical record, he must be judged directly by a scout.<span> </span>Thanks to the film <i>Moneyball</i>, even more than Michael Lewis’ book, people often see
stats and scouts as using diametrically opposite worldviews.<span> </span>But Phillips shows how, within the scouting
fraternity, there has been a constant drive through the years to objectify and
standardize qualitative observations.<span></span></span></p>
<p class="gmail-MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height:200%"><span style="font-family:Palatino"><span> </span>The audience for <i>Scouting and Scoring</i> 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.<span> </span>The sections on both scoring and scouting are
a little abstruse even for me, and I would seem within the target
audience.<span> </span>But via some extrapolation, I
think many readers could draw useful insights from Phillips’ book.<span> </span>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.<span> </span>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.<span> </span>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.<span></span></span></p>
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<p class="gmail-MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height:200%"><span style="font-family:Palatino">Phillips,
Christopher J. Scouting and Scoring: How We Know What We Know about Baseball. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2019. 301 pp. Hardcover, $27.95.</span><span style="font-family:Palatino"><span></span></span></p>
<p class="gmail-MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height:200%"><span style="font-family:Palatino"><span> </span></span></p>
</div><div><div><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature">Remember to smell the roses as you recumber past<br><br>Duncan R. Jamieson, Ph. D.<br>Professor of History<br>Book Review Editor<br><i>AETHLON: The Journal of Sport Literature</i><br>Ashland University<br>Ashland, OH 44805<br>USA<br></div></div></div></div>