'Scorecasting' has the inside scoop on sports

SCORECASTING: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won, by Tobias J. Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim. Crown Archetype, 288 pp., $26.

Even if Steven D. Levitt's blurb wasn't on the cover, you'd quickly get the idea that "Scorecasting" is the sports equivalent of "Freakonomics."

The most important and fascinating sports book in years has been written by an odd couple: Tobias J. Moskowitz, a professor of finance at the University of Chicago, and L. Jon Wertheim, a distinguished tennis writer and professor at Princeton. They're not the kind of guys who listen to your assertion and then say you're wrong; instead, they take a standard sports assumption (i.e., offense wins championships) or question (does calling a timeout before a field goal have an effect on the kicker's performance?), analyze the data and come up with a surprising but ultimately plausible conclusion.

In a chapter titled "The Myth of The Hot Hand," for instance, they conclude, "In every single sport (MLB, NBA, NHL, NFL, European soccer) we found . . . [the] true quality of teams can be measured best in large samples." Which means that contrary to the conventional wisdom of pundits, a team's overall performance during the regular season is a better predictor of postseason or tournament success than its most recent games.

Moskowitz and Wertheim point out that even when we're right, it's often for the wrong reasons. In "Comforts at Home," they confirm what any sports fan knows about the advantage of playing on your own turf. "The size of the [home field] advantage is remarkably stable in each sport," they write. "The home team's success rate is almost exactly the same in the last decade as it was 50 or even 100 years ago." And it's that way in every sport from baseball to soccer to cricket.

But why? After eliminating the rigors of travel and the noise of the home crowd, the authors conclude that the difference is officiating, which is almost always skewed slightly toward the home team. If you watched the Jets-Steelers AFC title game two weeks ago, you probably agree: announcers saw Mark Sanchez throwing an incomplete pass, but officials saw a fumble that resulted in a Pittsburgh touchdown.

In one of the most eye-opening chapters, the authors ask, "What isn't in the Mitchell Report? " Their research reveals that the use of these drugs "is more prevalent among players who came from areas with lower average income, lower high school and college graduation rates, and higher unemployment." PEDs, the authors maintain, are definitely a problem, but the problem is one of disadvantaged kids desperate for a major-league career: "Players from poorer neighborhoods were not more likely to use recreational drugs, just PEDs."

"Scorecasting" will change the way you watch sports, but don't start reading it during a game. You're liable to get lost in it and miss the action.