Book Review: ‘Baseball Between the Numbers’ by the Baseball Prospectus Team of Experts

*Written in 2014.

This book is a monster. It’s also a pretty enjoyable book if you are like me. By “me”, I mean someone who has an unhealthy obsession over baseball as well as numbers. I’ve always been a pretty big stat head and this book has essentially become my bible.

The Baseball Prospectus staff are a group of pretty interesting writers and mathematicians who employ the use of sabermetrics and go pretty deep with it. Through this book, they try to settle age long debates and actually create a lot of new debates by proposing questions and offering up the math to backup their claims.

Baseball Between the Numbers tries to leave no stone unturned and it does a solid job of asking questions you didn’t even know you wanted answers to. It attempts to settle the debate between who was better, Babe Ruth or Barry Bonds. It also asks why Billy Beane’s tactics don’t work in the playoffs. It even uses math to show the effects of steroids in baseball.

I love this book, it is one of my favorites. They have written a follow-up, which I will read shortly. I actually wish they had the time to make one of these books each year.

Rating: 9.5/10
Pairs well with: The SABR Baseball List & Record Book by the Society for American Baseball Research, The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract by Bill James.