Book Review: Scorecasting

I just finished the wonderful book Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports are Played and Games Are Won.  It's full of great insight into the psychology behind different sports, backed up by statistical measures that demonstrate the impact to the games' outcomes.  I would recommend it to anyone interested in setting realistic expectations when it comes to the likely outcome of sports events (on a macro or micro scale), and especially sports statistics bloggers interested in improving their coverage of key factors in their analysis.  Special note to readers only interested in soccer statistics: this book is written from an American sports perspective, so it is heavy on football, baseball, and basketball.  It does have several great chapters that utilize soccer as an example, especially the chapter that identifies the true source of home field advantage, but don't expect anything close to the coverage found in Soccernomics or Gaming the World.

Herewith are some of my favorite parts of the book:

• The first chapter on officials' propensity to swallow their whistle at key moments provides great insight into the idea of sins of omission versus commission.  The concept is pretty simple - as the penalty of making the wrong call goes up, refs are more likely to swallow their whistle and let players determine the outcome of the game.  What's amazing is the statistical data that backs this up - shrinking and widening strike zones based upon the pitch count and game's score, the way loose ball calls will go late in a basketball game, and the dreaded make up call.  It doesn't make the officiating less biased to understand why it's happening and how big the bias is, but perhaps it will be a bit less maddening via my new understanding.
• A brief chapter on the Pittsburgh Steelers (a dominant NFL team) and the Pittsburgh Pirates (a pitiful MLB team) highlights the impact economics can have on the competitiveness of professional sports, a topic readers of my blog know all too well.
• A chapter on the value of blocked shots in basketball is a great example of how sports analytics can turn MVP awards (or in this case, the NBA's Defensive Player of the Year) on their head based upon how shallow or deep the metrics within the evaluation.  In this specific chapter, Dwight Howard's league-leading blocked shot total turns out to be of the least value because they predominantly go out-of-bounds or to a player on the shooting team.  Tim Duncan, on the other hand, has a much higher percentage of his blocked shots turn into turnovers that benefit his team.  The key lesson: statistics are meaningless if what your measuring doesn't actually correlate to team success.
• The statistical treatment of the sources of home field advantage are outstanding, caveats notwithstanding.  One chapter deals with dispelling the myths related to home field advantage - crowd support bolstering play on the field, the impacts of travel on the away team, or better knowledge of the peculiarities of their home stadium and field.  The subsequent chapter shows a pretty compelling source of the home field advantage - referee bias due to their subconscious desire to comport to the crowd's expectations.  Anyone doing analysis on the effects of match outcome, especially referee bias, must take venue into account to avoid confounding it with other factors that aren't the true sources of variation.
• Finally, I loved the final chapter that dealt with the hapless Chicago Cubs.  The authors, Cubs fan themselves, show that the Cubs aren't unlucky. In fact, they seem to be quite average when it comes to luck.  What's really going on with the Cubs is that their players and management are responding completely rationally to economic incentives.  Why should they strive to put a higher quality product on the field when it seems as if Cubs fans will keep showing up to the ballpark regardless of the team's record?  The authors provide copious data from other baseball teams to demonstrate a number of the more successful clubs have fan bases that are actually sensitive to the on-field product and its success (or lack thereof).  This may be viewed as "bandwagon" fan behavior by many of a team's die hard supporters, but it turns out such sensitivity by the fan base ensures management is equally as sensitive to the performance of the team.  I've always been a proponent of such feedback - I walked out of the Sounders 0-4 drubbing at the hands of the LA Galaxy to send a clear message to the Sounder's management team.  It worked, as they refunded the price of that game's tickets.  Now I have the data to back up such a position, and have a leg to stand on the next time I am accussed of "not supporting my team".