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A book review of "The Wages of Wins"

Date published: 10/29/2006

By BILL FREEHLING

The average sports fan's analysis of teams and players tends to be fairly simplistic.

We watch a basketball game and decide that the guy who scored the most points is the best player. We see quarterbacks go head to head and assume the one whose team wins is superior. And the baseball player who leads the league in batting average is clearly the most talented in the game.

Wrong, wrong and wrong, say the authors of a wonderful new book that uses advanced statistics to debunk many conventional wisdoms in sports. The book, "The Wages of Wins," is the work of economics professors David Berri, Martin Schmidt and Stacey Brook.

The growth of fantasy leagues is turning more sports fans into numbers freaks, as they seek ways to gain insight into individual player performances. But few of these fantasy geeks are trained in advanced statistical methods.

The authors of "The Wages of Wins" are so trained, and they use this to debunk some popular assumptions in sports. The professors mostly leave the statistical methods out of the main text and focus on the conclusions.

Even though they attempted to keep the book simple, it's still not an easy read. A fair amount of math remains. But dedicated sports fan would be well advised to put in the effort to read it.

The theme uniting the book is that sports executives seem to have many wrong ideas about how to evaluate talent. This leads to executives paying too much for the wrong attributes. The authors focus much of their study on the National Basketball Association, but they also touch on professional baseball and football.

Here are some of their findings:

People assume that Major League Baseball teams cannot compete unless they're willing to shell out an exorbitant payroll. In reality, the authors find, payroll explains only a small percentage of team wins.

Competitive balance in MLB is better than it used to be 50 years ago, and better than the balance of the NBA. A fascinating finding is that the biggest determinant of a sport's competitive balance is how many people out there play the game.

The Wages of Wins By David Berri, Martin Schmidt and Stacey Brook (Stanford University Press, 304 pages, $29.95)

Date published: 10/29/2006