Baseball Hacks

Acknowledgments

First, I would like to thank the many sports writers who helped me with this book. Baseball is a competitive sport, but baseball writing is not. Some of this help is visible: Mark Johnson, Tom Dierickx, Brendan Roberts, and Pete Palmer contributed hacks to this book. Additionally, I exchanged email with each of these experts while writing this book, and I received many useful corrections and suggestions on early drafts. I especially would like to thank Pete Palmer for his assistance. His books inspired many of the hacks in this book, and his comments helped me to fix many mistakes.

In addition to these four contributors, I would like to thank Thomas Gorman, Phil Birnbaum, David Tybor, Dean Oliver, Justin Plouffe, Adam Levensohn, Dan Mueller, Dave Carrano, Darren Kelly, Gary Gillette, John Viega, and Roger Magoulas for reviewing early drafts of this book and providing helpful feedback.

Next, I would like to thank the editors and staff at O’Reilly—in particular, editors Andrew Odewahn and Tatiana Apandi. Unless you try to write a book, you do not appreciate how important a good editor is. An editor not only corrects and refines a book’s text but also helps the author to define the content and manages the writing process. Andrew and Tatiana made this a much stronger book, and I am grateful for their help.

Additionally, I would like to thank my father for introducing me to probability and data analysis. In college, my dad took a class called Probabilistic Systems Analysis ...