Scouting and Scoring: How We Know What We Know about Baseball

"The subject of Christopher Phillips’s Scouting and Scoring is baseball, but it’s worth reading for more than just the baseball. The book is an effort to help us understand one of the oldest problems in modern societies, which is how to evaluate human beings."—Louis Menand, New Yorker

"Phillips’ book is an enticing read for baseball data enthusiasts and, more broadly, those interested in thinking about notions such as ‘fact’ and ‘truth,’ how one measures the seemingly immeasurable, and attempts to quantify human potential."—Russ Goodman, MAA Reviews

"Christopher Phillips knows that you can't spell history without story. He goes back, back, back—from beyond the dawn of baseball's quantification and evaluation through to today's worship of objective data—to find where subjectivity and humanity stubbornly lurk. Scouting and Scoring is provocative, thorough, and brilliant."—John Thorn, official historian of Major League Baseball

"Many have written about the sabermetric revolution, but no one has ever presented the history of it all in such a coherent and entertaining fashion as Christopher Phillips has done here. Everyone interested in understanding modern baseball needs to read this book."—Dave Smith, founder of Retrosheet

"With clear and careful writing, Scouting and Scoring describes how, for a large part of its history, professional baseball has been accompanied by an array of performance statistics. Chronicling different phases in baseball’s development since the nineteenth century, this book focuses on the performance measures used and the bureaucratic infrastructures that supported their use. This is a great topic and not just for those that like baseball."—Michael Lynch, Cornell University

"This striking, elegant, and brilliant book offers a dual account of the scouting and scoring traditions that have made modern baseball what it is. Scouting and Scoring is a unique contribution to the history of quantification—and the history of the modern human sciences more generally—told by a talented historian with a great love for the untold stories of baseball tabulators."—Rebecca Lemov, Harvard University