Two Monday Sox Machine Podcasts ago, I talked to Russell Carleton, who wrote "The Shift: The Next Evolution in Baseball Thinking." I recommended the book, as it does a good job of covering the thinking behind analytics, and not just the analytics themselves. Carleton is a psychologist by trade, so he gets into the cognitive biases that lead baseball personnel and fans to wrong conclusions, how analytics has addressed these issues, and how gray area remains due to the human element. There's also some "gory math" for fans who want to understand the algorithms underneath it, but you can scan over it and still come away with an understanding of the concepts.
One weakness is that sometimes it felt like chapters were organized a little loosely, and the personal anecdote setting the tone for a section didn't quite always provide a straight "through-line" the way I expected. This could also be user error, because this is the first book I've read as an e-version.
At any rate, I bring this up because I'm trying to figure out what to read next, at least before Hawk Harrelson's autobiography comes out. I've been on an American history groove, knocking out Ulysses Grant's memoirs, "President McKinley: Architect of the American Century" by Robert W. Merry and "Benjamin Franklin: An American Life" by Walter Isaacson in succession. They're all worthwhile, with the McKinley book augmenting what I've read about Theodore Roosevelt.
I can probably keep going on this track -- I buy David McCullough books when I find them on remainder racks in hardcover -- but I feel like I need to vary my diet a little bit. Since it's an off day, are there any books you've read recently that you'd recommend?
