In order to
give it the space it deserves, we’re saving our interview with Baseball Prospectus staffer Steven Goldman,
a contributor to BP’s excellent new book Baseball
Between the Numbers,
for the Phoenix’s Red Sox supplement (which
will hit streets right before opening day).
But you
should go check out Goldman’s Q&A, “Learning to Think Like Theo,” at the BU Barnes and Noble on Tuesday, March 21.
In Baseball Between the Numbers, the BP
brainiacs lift the veil of mystery from Sabermetrics,
gearing their lucid essays and number-crunching toward the average fan and, in the process, debunking
some commonly held assumptions about the game — that batting order is
important, for instance, or that a five-man rotation is preferable to four. Baseball Prospectus is an essential hardball handbook, and the ideas it's formulated have changed the game.
And don’t let the fact that Goldman
is the creator of the long-running Pinstriped Bible
and Pinstriped
Blog pages at the YESNetwork Web
site put you off. He was also the editor of the amazing Mind
Game: How the Boston Red Sox Got Smart, Won a World Series, and Created a New
Blueprint for Winning. If the
Red Sox hadn’t starting thinking about the game and its statistics in a new
way, he says, if they hadn’t hired Theo and taken on SABR founder Bill
James as a consultant, that World Series banner probably wouldn’t have been
raised last April.
Come ask
him about his thoughts for the upcoming season. About whether or not David
Ortiz really is a clutch hitter. About whether it’s really true that you
can never have too much
pitching. About whether it was worth trading Andy
Marte to get Coco
Crisp. Goldman is a smart dude who knows his baseball. Pick his brain.
That’s at 7 pm on
Tuesday, March 21 at Barnes & Noble at Boston University, 660 Beacon Street, Kenmore Square, in Boston.