Scorecasting by Tobias J. Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim - A-

This book is likely for a narrow audience.  Scorecasting was written by two boyhood friends--one is now a sports journalist for Sports Illustrated (Wertheim) and the other is now a finance professor at the University of Chicago and colleague of Stephen Levitt, co-author of Freakonomics and Superfreakonomics.

For a non-sports fan, the rest of this entry can be summarized thusly:  blah blah blah blah blahblah blah blah BLAH!  Those who continue on do so at their own risk.

Scorecasting is basically a Freakonomics of sports.  The authors select a number of accepted sports beliefs (home field advantage, there's no "I" in team and others) and attempt to prove or disprove them through statistical analysis.  Where they find truth to the beliefs, they further analyze the data to try to reach a conclusion about the underlying reasons.

For instance (and I have heard this discussed on radio interviews with the authors, so this, in my opinion--which is the only opinion that matters on my blog--does not violate my "no spoilers" rule), the authors show that home field advantage is a truism in all sports.  Larger in some than others, but applicable to all sports, from the US major sports to soccer (over the pond) to Japanese baseball.  After analyzing the data, however, they prove that performances of home team players vs. visiting team players do not vary.  Among other data used to prove the point, the authors looked at certain statistics where they could isolate a statistic and factor out all of the "noise."  For example, the home team in the NBA makes precisely the same percentage of free throws as the visitors.  Soccer penalty shots are identical as well.  And so on.

What does differ, however, is the way that the umpires or referees call the games.  This "referee bias" is surprisingly prevalent and noticeable in looking at the data.  Home teams are called for fewer fouls than visitors in the NBA.  The strike zone is bigger for the pitcher, and smaller for the hitter, with respect to the home team.  The basic conclusion (I'm being intentionally overly-simplistic) is that, well, if you were an umpire, and 30,000 fans cheered every time you called a strike and booed every time you called a ball, wouldn't you be predisposed to call borderline pitches a strike?

Freakonomics was, in many ways, revolutionary.  Whether you "buy" the authors' conclusions or not, their ability to turn conventional wisdom on its head was thought-provoking.

Scorecasting doesn't have as much impact.  For a sports fan, it is a fun, quick read.  Its conclusions aren't going to keep you up nights with your brain tied up in knots, though.

Live long, read and prosper.  We'll leave the lights on for you.