Book Review: The Graphical Player

One of the most frequently used sayings is, "a picture says a thousand words."  Most of us don't even know who is credited with saying it first (some say Confucius, some say the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev, other say an advertising executive), but we all would agree it's one of the more valid proverbs we use in everyday life.

Graphs are often described as pictures of data.  While tables of numbers can be revealing, a pie chart or a bar graph can drive the point home, giving the reader or researcher a mental image of the take-home message.

Along those lines, if graphs are pictures of data, then The Graphical Player [4th Ed.] by John Burnson is the over-sized photo album of the 2006 season.  Throughout the 219 pages, Burnson displays the individual data of every major league player in 2006, graphically displayed in such a way as to give the reader a real feel for the trends, relative performance, and luck that each player went through.

To a certain extent, The Graphical Player is geared slightly towards the fantasy baseball player as the graphics lend an eye towards projections for upcoming seasons.  For instance, Burnson has crunched some numbers and has developed a statistic called "sim ERA", which is similar to DIPS and FIP ERA in that it looks at a pitcher's peripheral statistics and determines how much of a factor luck was in that pitcher's ERA.  But true to form, the numbers are not regurgitated straight from Burnson's spreadsheet, instead they are displayed on a bell curve of the most probable ERA's for the pitcher and where the pitcher's real ERA fell on that bell curve [Phillies-centric note: most Phillies pitchers had better sim ERA's than their real ERA's, which, while it was a bad thing for 2006 portends good things for 2007].

Graphical player data makes up the bulk of the book but there's more to it than that.  Craig Brown, Marc Normadin, and Jeff Sackmann provide one or two lines of commentary for each player, game logs for each team are displayed in the form of sparklines, and in a very interesting section of the book, Sackmann objectively analyzes each organization's minor-league system by comparing major-league equivalent OPS and age [Phillies-centric note: the Phils' farm system ranks 10th in baseball, far better than most subjective rankings are suggesting].

The subtitle chosen for the book is "The Next Step in Sabermetric Research" which, in my estimation, sells the book short.  In my mind, it's more like the next step in the way baseball fans look at statistics.

Somebody should call Topps and Fleer, because these are the pictures that should be on the back of their cards.