Baseball Prospectus | Baseball ProGUESTus: Scorecasting Review 

I finished up reading Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won a couple of weeks ago. I recommend it whole-heartedly, but this is a pretty good summary of how I feel about it:

When Moneyball came out, it didn’t take long for the importance of on-base percentage to become part of mainstream conventional wisdom. It would be great if some of the findings in the book did the same—the debunking of the ‘hot hand,’ for instance, or ‘icing the kicker.’ However, I’d hate for ‘home field advantage is caused by biased referees’ to do the same—because that’s a huge claim, and I don’t think it’s true. Ideally, the authors would have consulted some of the practicing sabermetricians in the various sports—the Prospectus writers, Tom Tango, Brian Burke, Gabriel Desjardins, and so forth—who would undoubtedly have pointed out some issues and advised the authors to temper some of their conclusions.

It's possible that having to qualify some of the results would make for a less popular book. In any case, Moskowitz and Wertheim are outstanding at getting their ideas across effortlessly. With a little more collaboration from others who study this stuff, this could have easily been the best popular sabermetrics book since Bill James. As it stands, it’s still recommended reading, but I wish it came with a warning to take some of its conclusions with a grain of salt."

(Via Baseball Prospectus.)

Scorecasting is a great read. And, if you're reading it with a somewhat open mind, you'll learn a lot, but also pause a lot and say "wow, I feel like I'm missing a whole side of this argument." Which is pretty much exactly how I felt reading Freakonomics.

(Note: If you buy the book from the Amazon link above, I get like 12 cents.)