To start, Trading Bases by Joe Peta was not a book I planned on reading. I saw the title (a pun on the great comedy Trading Places), saw that it was at least slightly about advanced stats and jumped in. A short period of time later, I was finished and extremely happy that I made that decision.
So you aren’t as uninformed as I was, this is a gambling book. It is also a baseball book and a business book. Despite being three things at the same time, the lines between the topics are fairly clear. For example, the first chapter is about baseball, and in particular the love of the game, then the next five are about advanced statistics in baseball. The next two are on betting in baseball, then it finally gets into the business aspects. Every couple chapters provides an update on the gambling situation, but he never really goese deep into advanced stats again, with only a few pure baseball chapters discussing his love of the game.
[protected-iframe id=”5a56a4d568403552dee19fa314a39fc9-114320562-107853376″ info=”//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0451415175&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=burnin09-20″ ]For the new school baseball fan, like myself, it is the first quarter of the book that is particularly valuable. In it, he introduces his proprietary stat, “Cluster Luck,” which unfortunately has not caught on nationally. If the book were just about this stats and its ramifications in projecting baseball and through that, betting on games, it would be less than half the length and still worth reading.
For an example, Cody Allen has allowed a .212 average against over his career and a .177 in 2016, yet on August 18th he came in with a two run lead and allowed three singles, all of which could have been outs, before giving up a grand slam to Chicago and taking the blown save and loss. In 65 of his other 66 appearances he allowed two or less hits and he hadn’t allowed a single hit in his previous six appearances. Against Chicago, he was the victim of cluster luck.
Other than cluster luck, I won’t delve very deep into any one aspect of this book, but this is really the most important truly new thing mentioned in the book. While most of his model was based on pythagorean winning percent and the PECOTA projection system, those are things everyone has access to. First, he noticed that from time to time, a team would outscore another team despite having a worse slash line. We’re all well familiar with Moneyball at this point and the importance of OPS, yet there are times when teams greatly outperform their on base percent and slugging when compared to other teams. His primary example is the 2010 Tampa Bay Rays, who were third in baseball with 802 runs scored, but 14th in OPS at .736.
He covers the idea over multiple chapters and shows many other examples, but his findings are essentially that the increase in expected runs came from what some would call clutch, but more advanced thinkers would call luck.
This is not meant to be a personal insult to those who believe in “clutch,” but it’s been statistically proven that it doesn’t exist and the fact that nearly the same Rays line-up had a .724 OPS the next year, but only scored 707 runs can help those who don’t already understand find their way to the truth.
Rather than list all the arguments here, I’ll simply say that Peta does an excellent job showing the unenlightened the way. Rather than reading a similar argument from Baseball Prospectus, Peta takes a different angle at these situations and gives examples from the business world, particularly the stock market. If you are among the uninitiated in advanced stats and just try to dive right in, you may get lost fairly quickly, but if you are already familiar with the stock market, the examples in this book are extremely clear and after reading, you shouldn’t be able to go back to your old way of thinking.
If you are not familiar with the stock market, however, you might just get even more lost. While he does his best to explain it, Wallstreet is a lot more complicated than sabermetrics. That doesn’t, however, make it uninteresting. Snuck into this baseball betting book is an extensive look at the downfall of Lehman Brothers (where Peta used to work) and the most recent recession in general. As someone from the inside with a different point of view, he is able to explain what happened fairly clearly to the average reader and how it is likely to happen again. If you liked The Big Short and Wolf of Wallstreet, this is a different take on a similar situation and can help those who were hurt by the situation in real life understand what happened better.
He draws from his personal experiences to speak on Wallstreet, baseball and tell some other amusing anecdotes. While some hit, others fall flat and if there was one thing this book could have done less with it was the emotional personal stories. Some end up straying far from the mark and the second half of the book drags a bit because of it. While we are waiting to hear the results of the bets he is making based off his model, there will be a diatribe into something that is fairly relevant to the rest of the book. Some of this goes to explain his love of the game and he explains his inclusion of these stories near the end of the book to show that he isn’t all stats.
Of course, the primary reason most people would be buying this book is to get an edge on Vegas in sports betting and he did have one. There are month by month breakdowns for the entire 2011 season throughout as well as much of 2012 in the epilogue. While his system does work to a point, my first question that remains unresolved is where he was making the almost certainly illegal bets. He started the system because he couldn’t get out of his New York City apartment and finished the year in San Francisco. He never mentions having someone else in Las Vegas making bets on his behalf and in the epilogue, when he does spend significant time in Sin City, he mentions issues with the system that should have already existed if he had been legally betting the previous year.
It is the tediousness of placing individual bets in Las Vegas, currently the only legal location for this type of bet, that makes the system untenable. If you think you can buy this book and make a living off the information, you better have millions in the bank to start, as Peta did, and plan on living full time in the desert of Nevada. Despite being a businessman, Peta also never covers the time value of money and considering how long it took to return, in some cases, just a 10% increase, I have to wonder if his skills could have been used more efficiently elsewhere.
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