Brian Kenny formerly of ESPN and Baseball Tonight and now MLB Network’s leading host of MLB Now, which rages some fun debates about current and former players centered around stats. Kenny also developed MLB Network’s “The Shredder” which is supposed to take out bias when ranking players for certain awards or best at their position.
Kenny is one the most enlightened MLB hosts on television when it comes to stats and modern strategy and concepts. If you think Kenny is all new-age stats, his book Ahead of the Curve also explores the history of the game deeply regarding strategy and stumping to kill unnecessarily valued statistics today.
As you would expect, Kenny has chapters on killing the win as well as batting average and the save with explanations, stats and examples to back up the ridiculousness. Instead of just railing against batting average, he digs into the history of why it was once a highly valued statistic and what changed in the game to make it lose its weight. He also makes an excellent case for killing the error for the obvious reasons you would expect based on scoring decisions made based on human bias which of course involves too much unfair variance. Kenny adeptly uses a deep knowledge of the game’s history to show that the shift isn’t a new thing either.
The book came out last summer, so it didn’t have time to include Terry Francona‘s exploits and use of Andrew Miller in the 2016 postseason but certainly hit on the historical concept of baseball’s “firemen” which pre-dates even Goose Gossage’s multi-inning efforts. There is a good portion of the book dedicated to relievers in general and explaining the times-through-the-order penalty and because of the time of the book, the Royals relief pitching strategy.
While this part of the chapter doesn’t go in depth on it specifically, Indians fans would be interested to read his thoughts on writers and MVP voting as it related to the 1995 MVP race and Albert Belle. The story, if you don’t already know it, is that Belle was the first player in history with 50 doubles and 50 homers. The Indians went 100-44 in a strike shortened season which usually would help Belle’s narrative of having a historically good season on the most dominant team that season. The MVP award instead went to Mo Vaughn because the writers made it about themselves and their bias because Belle was a jerk (to put it very mildly) to the media and practically everyone at any given moment really. It doesn’t take any stats or genius to understand that the writers (purposely) blew it on that vote but Kenny also notes other cases as well.
There is also an interesting section about selection bias regarding managers as it relates to race, gender, age and experience. Kenny details examples of managers “looking the part” getting the job, which is one of the most interesting parts of the books that doesn’t involve statistics.
Kenny also gives credit to John Hart and the Indians front office of the early 90s for developing “Diamond View” the statistical and information database they developed that basically can be traced to the start of baseball’s analytical revolution even before Billy Beane and Paul DePodesta.
Probably my favorite section of the book is where Kenny talks about the pitfalls of signing free agents over the age of 30. He lists factors of age, length of contract and defensive spectrum to point out obvious risks of long term contracts to aging players.
You don’t have to be into advanced statistics to enjoy this book. In fact, if you’re not a fan of them, this book might help you see how they relate in historical context of the game and its strategies and concepts. For me, it blew my mind to see how the game has been played over the years with all this information and history yet still today managers manage the game as if none of it ever existed. I tweeted at Kenny midway through this book to explain this and his response was great:
https://twitter.com/MrBrianKenny/status/894609156371619840
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