The Wages of Wins: Taking Measure of the Many Myths in Modern Sport. Updated Edition

Fantastic read. Not something that one can read quickly or just skim if one hopes to get the most out of the book. There is a lot of analysis that takes time to comprehend in order to most appreciate the messages of the various chapters/topics. This book is best to read when one has a lot of quiet time as opposed to reading bits and pieces riding on the bus or waiting in the doctors waiting room. I certainly have enjoyed reading it even though one reads at a slower pace compared to reading some fiction novel. Great book !!!!

WoW is a great introduction to thinking more critically about sports and how we define "the best".

Freakonomic sports. This delightful book uses the statistics coming from professional sports combined with the mathematical analysis tools from mathematics to develop a bunch of very interesting tidbits that you would never have guessed. As an example, here are their top ten discoveries: 1. The teams that pay the most, win the most, in other words, sports teams can buy the fans' love. 2. Labor disputes threaten the future of professional sports. 3. Major League Baseball has a competitive balance problem. 4. A league's competitive balance is determined by league policy. 5. National Basketball Association (NBA) teams need 'stars' to attract the fans. 6. The best players in basketball score the most. 7. The best players in basketball make their teammates more productive. 8. The best players in basketball play their best in the playoffs. 9. Quarterbacks should be credited with wins and losses in the National Football League (NFL). 10. If we understand a quarterback's past performance we can predict his future productivity. Ya got all that? Each point is the subject of much discussion in the book, and at the end you'll find it hard to argue with what they say. This is a rather light hearted look at sports that I really enjoyed.

Review: The Wages of Wins by David Berri, Martin Schmidt and Stacey Brook This book is written by economists on their analysis in the world of sports. They tried to approach their work similar to the approach that fellow economist Steven Levitt did in his book Freakonomics (co-written with Stephen Dubner). The book is written for the non-economist so there is little math and economic mumbo-jumbo in the text. When the authors cannot get by without mentioning regression analysis or correlation, it does seem they try to explain it clearly with words and not just numbers. Still, this book will be enjoyed more by those that have at least a tiny grasp of these concepts. The topics that are covered in this book include: the impact of strikes/lockouts in professional sports on fan attendance, competitive balance in major sports leagues, who is better: Shaq or Kobe (the designing of a model to value a NBA players contribution to team wins), and the inconsistency of NFL quarterbacks. A general theme throughout the book is to step away from the long-held beliefs of sports fans and GMs, but to look at issues and problems from an analytical perspective. The results they get from the data are often interesting and different than one would expect. The topics are thought-provoking (although not always 100% convincing, it does make you think deeply about many issues) and the book is easy to read. The authors' goal of transforming their articles in economics journals into a book for everyone is a success. These economists even inject some humor throughout the book! Overall, I recommend this book to all sports fans, particularly NBA fans.

Berry and his co-authors take a really fresh approach here to the world of sport, and look at the big dollars that get spent - or mispent - by teams that want to win at all costs. The mistake that team owners are making, according to the authors, is that they are looking at the wrong statistics of success. When you buy a player, what are the vital stats that really matter? The book is at once disheartening (money buys one hell of a lot of the points we see on the various league tables) but then also entirely heartening: individual sportspeople, and b-teams still rock the game and lift their performance way above the odds. The difference is that many managers and coaches (and us fans for that matter focus on the wrong numbers. We count the goals that a player scores, but discount the fumbles, the turnovers and the other dynamics of team play. A star goal shooter may actually be bad for the team's chance of winning. Sports these days is dominated by statistics. You listen to a commentary and you hear the win/lose ratios, the all-time earnings figures, the goals, the assists and what have you. Well here the authors put another set of very relevant numbers on the table - and show how they reached these conclusions. Their arguments are pretty convincing and as a result I think we'll be talking about this book for some time to come - and pondering the nature of sports today and whether Player X really is greater than Player Y. What a fresh piece of writing! Buy it - I'm sure you'll enjoy it as much as I did.