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.)
Around Christmas time, I was shopping in the Burlington Mall and saw one of the Andelman brothers working their little Phantom Gourmet booth shilling coupon books. And I laughed. Mostly because I imagined the internal thought process being something like "I'm a TV star, why do I have to work in a mall with these...plebians,", but also a little bit "Ha. What a racket. Sell coupons to the restaurants you review on TV."
Well, here's another reason to laugh at them.
Mike Andelman: We walk in and the hostess who’s the typical hot woman, rude, cold- as-ice, never would talk to me in high school-type girl...So she goes, “Two?”, and I said yes, and she looks at us and says, “I’m sorry, we’re not open until 5:30, so there’s nothing I can do.”
Dan Andelman: And what time was this at?
Mike: 5:05.
Eddie Andelman: It was about 5:10.
<snip>
Mike: And it’s not like this was 8pm on a Saturday night. It’s 5 o’clock, and guess what, if the owner of Grill 23 was standing next to this dumb hostess, this moronic hostess who was just getting her, uh, jollies off by sticking to the rules of her little brochure in a little binder, this little monkey, her only job is to look at this binder and say don’t let people in ‘till 5:30...
Dan: Although in her defense she was good-looking apparently. I’d like to see a picture. Was she wearing yoga pants? These are things I want to know. I have a thing for hostesses.
Mike: There’s not a hostess who’s not good-looking, because they’re incompetent and can’t do anything else in life. If you can’t model, when you’re good-looking enough and not tall enough to model, you stand behind a little box and say, How many?
Jesus. What enormous tools.
(Via Server Not Servant.)