Baseball's All-Time Best Hitters: How Statistics Can Level the Playing Field

Description

Tony Gwynn is the greatest hitter in the history of baseball. That's the conclusion of this engaging and provocative analysis of baseball's all-time best hitters. Michael Schell challenges the traditional list of all-time hitters, which places Ty Cobb first, Gwynn sixteenth, and includes just eight players whose prime came after 1960. Schell argues that the raw batting averages used as the list's basis should be adjusted to take into account that hitters played in different eras, with different rules, and in different ballparks. He makes those adjustments and produces a new list of the 100 best hitters that will spark debate among baseball fans and statisticians everywhere.

Michael Schell is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of North Carolina and Director of the Biostatistics Core Facility at the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. He is the author of "Baseball's All-Time Best Sluggers: Adjusted Batting Performance from Strikeouts to Home Runs" (Princeton) and has published more than 100 research articles on statistics and cancer.

"[A] trenchant attempt to reorder the hierarchy... [Schell's] calculations produce a new all-time greatest hitter, revealed in sometimes breathless prose."--Joseph Kahn, New York Times "[Schell] has provided a wealth of baseball trivia and statistics. The style of writing is engaging and often lively and, in fact, encourages continued debate over the data and conclusions presented. The text will undoubtedly become a part of the baseball statistics fan's library."--Randall J. Swift, Mathematical Association of America Online Book Review "Buried deep within every true baseball fan is a nerd with a scorecard and a calculator... To refute those who say players from different eras can't be compared because they played in different circumstances, Schell levels the playing field by building models to account for those varying circumstances: ballparks, pitching quality, night games, etc... His conclusions are often surprising but well substantiated."--Booklist "[Schell] ranks current player Tony Gwynn as the best all-time hitter, well ahead of the modern batting king, Ted Williams, and no doubt outraging the ghosts of Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth... All in all, this book is for the hardcore baseball fan..."--Library Journal "Altogether, a good read..."--Earl Gutskey, The Los Angeles Times