''The Hidden Game of Baseball'' is a book by baseball statisticians

John Thorn John A. Thorn (born April 17, 1947) is a German-born sports historian, author, publisher, and cultural commentator. Since March 1, 2011, he has been the Official Baseball Historian for Major League Baseball. Personal profile Thorn was born in ...

and

Pete Palmer Pete Palmer (born January 30, 1938) is an American sports statistician and encyclopedia editor. He is a major contributor to the applied mathematical field referred to as sabermetrics. Along with the Bill James ''Baseball Abstracts'', Palmer's ...

. It was published in 1984, and is considered to be a seminal work in the fields of

sabermetrics Sabermetrics, or originally SABRmetrics, is the empirical analysis of baseball, especially baseball statistics that measure in-game activity. Sabermetricians collect and summarize the relevant data from this in-game activity to answer specific ques ...

and

baseball history The question of the origins of baseball has been the subject of debate and controversy for more than a century. Baseball and the other modern bat, ball, and running games — stoolball, cricket and rounders — were developed from folk games in ...

Overview

Thorn and Palmer began collaborating on an encyclopedia under the working title ''Complete Baseball'', but could not meet the publisher's schedule. Instead, they began working on a smaller work focused on sabermetrics. ''The Hidden Game'' reappraised the relationship between in-game activity and the outcome of baseball games, suggesting that many of the statistics traditionally focused on up to that point did not meaningfully contribute to the likelihood of wins or losses. In particular, the book demonstrated that there was a stronger correlation between runs scored and the outcome of games. It is also credited with popularizing the use of run expectation tables in baseball analysis. The book received critical praise at the time of its publication, and has since been reprinted.

Overview

See also