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Scouting and scoring : how we know what we know about baseball / Christopher J. Phillips.

by Phillips, Christopher.

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Princeton University Press, 2019.

Baseball -- Decision making -- History.

Baseball players -- Selection and appointment -- History.

Baseball -- Scouting -- History.

Baseball -- Scorekeeping -- History.

Sports officiating.

9780691180212 (hc.)

vii, 301 p. : ill. ; 22 cm.

The bases of data -- Henry Chadwick and scoring technology -- Official scoring -- From project scoresheet to big dat -- The practice of pricin g the body -- Measuring head and heart -- A machine for objectivity.

"Tracing baseball's story from the nineteenth century to today, Phillips explains that the sport was one of the earliest and most consequential fields for the introduction of numerical analysis. New technologies and methods of data collection were supposed to enable teams to quantify the drafting and managing of players--replacing scouting with scoring. But that's not how things turned out. Over the decades, scouting and scoring started looking increasingly similar. Scouts expressed their judgments in highly formulaic ways, using numerical grades and scientific instruments to evaluate players. Scorers drew on moral judgments, depended on human labor to maintain and correct data, and designed bureaucratic systems to make statistics appear reliable. From the invention of official scorers and Statcast to the creation of the Major League Scouting Bureau, the history of baseball reveals the inextricable connections between human expertise and data science."

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