Statistical Thinking in Sports Review

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(More customer reviews)Jim Albert is a professor of statistics and an avid baseball fan. In addition to being one of the leaders of the Section on Statistics in Sports, he has also written the book "Curve Ball" with Jay Bennett that covers the use of statistical methods in baseball. Another one of his books was written for teachers of elementary statistics courses. It teaches them how to make an introductory statistics course interesting by having all the examples come from baseball.
This book is a collection of papers edited by Albert and Koning that covers a wide variety of sports, all with the same theme of showing how serious statistical methods can be used to learn important things about the sport through formal statistical inference and predictions. Albert and Koning wrote an introductory chapter and Albert has also written a chapter in this book about clutch hitting in baseball. Hal Stern, the chairman of the Department of Statistics at UC Irvine and another avid baseball fan contributes a chapter on pitcher-hitter match-ups in baseball.
In 2002 at the Joint Statistical Meetings in New York, I was the program chair for the Section on Statistics in Sport, I am also a professional statistician with a great interest in sports and baseball in particular. Jan Magnus from the Netherlands gave an invited talk about the importance of the second serve in tennis at the invited session that I organized. His paper about myths in tennis is an outgrowth of that research. In addition to baseball, American professional and college football, tennis, European and English league soccer, ice hockey and basketball, these articles cover such sports as Australian football and Scottish football, the Olympic events and track.
Of all the topics covered, baseball is the dominant one. This book makes for interesting reading.

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Since the first athletic events found a fan base, sports and statistics have always maintained a tight and at times mythical relationship. As a way to relay the telling of a game's drama and attest to the prodigious powers of the heroes involved, those reporting on the games tallied up the numbers that they believe best described the action and best defined the winning edge. However, they may not have always counted the right numbers. Many of our hallowed beliefs about sports statistics have long been fraught with misnomers. Whether it concerns Scottish football or American baseball, the most revered statistics often have little to do with any winning edge.Covering an international collection of sports, Statistical Thinking in Sports provides an accessible survey of current research in statistics and sports, written by experts from a variety of arenas. Rather than rely on casual observation, they apply the rigorous tools of statistics to re-examine many of those concepts that have gone from belief to fact, based mostly on the repetition of their claims. Leaving assumption behind, these researchers take on a host of tough questions-
Is a tennis player only as good as his or her first serve?
Is there such a thing as home field advantage?
Do concerns over a decline in soccer's competitive balance have any merit?
What of momentum-is its staying power any greater than yesterday's win?
And what of pressure performers? Are there such creatures or ultimately, does every performer fall back to his or her established normative?Investigating a wide range of international team and individual sports, the book considers the ability to make predictions, define trends, and measure any number of influences. It is full of interesting and useful examples for those teaching introductory statistics. Although the articles are aimed at general readers, the serious researcher in sports statistics will also find the articles of value and highly useful as starting points for further research.

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