Book Review: Power Ball by Rob Neyer

You might already know the name Rob Neyer before you pick up the book Power Ball. Neyer is one of the baseball analytics OGs, having written for ESPN around the turn of the century, promoting sabermetric ideas at a time when that was not nearly as common or as cool as it is now.

Given the length of his career and the statistical revolution, you may also already have experience with the general premise of Power Ball by the time you are only a few pages into the book.

Power Ball is presented in the same vein as Arnold Hano’s A Day in the Bleachers or Dan Okrent’s Nine Innings. The idea is simple: take a random, seemingly meaningless regular season game and use it as the scaffolding to tell a…