How closely do you follow current work in sabermetrics?
Not as well as I should. I really have been kept busy with my publications. What baseball websites do you frequent? None really. Recently, you wrote the forward to The Book by Tom M. Tango, Mitchel Lichtman and Andy Dolphin. How did you come in contact with them and find out about their work? I have never met Tom, but I have corresponded with him via e-mail. Mitchel has purchased some reports from Gary and me, and I don’t know Andy. I thought their book was very good. What they did, as opposed to the Prospectus book that came out at the same time, was analyze in great detail a few situations, rather than cover a lot of different things. Another very important thing they did was show how much difference it actually makes to use the optimal strategy rather than the normal one. Unfortunately it turns out the answer is not much. I have been touting for years the idea that the third base coach should send the runner in from third almost any time there are two outs because it takes only a 30
