http://tinyurl.com/akuc7a2
FORTY-NINE YEARS AGO, Sports Illustrated profiled an engineering professor
with jolting theories about baseball. Earnshaw Cook, author of the
then-unreleased Percentage Baseball, claimed that advanced math and objective
analysis could turn any team into a pennant winner. He didn't call it
sabermetrics and he didn't call it Moneyball, but that's essentially what
Cook was proposing.
Also 49 years ago, a man in Wilmington, Del., named Herb Groh wrote a letter
to the magazine in response. "Thank goodness the game of baseball can never
be reduced to adding-machine accuracy," he wrote. "It's much more fun this
way."
Groh's letter speaks for many, especially today. Cook's book, meanwhile,
speaks for almost nobody: Many of his findings turned out to be wrong and
would have actually cost teams wins. But science rarely gets it right the
first time; it gets it right over time. Wins Above Replacement