This book backed up a lot of what I’ve suspected, particularly in reference to the stupidity of playing “smallball.” I was able to follow the math most of the time, and when I wasn’t following exactly it was because I was more interested in what the numbers revealed than in the numbers themselves. A few of the chapters in the middle were dull — Do high salaries lead to high ticket prices? Does baseball need a salary cap? One of the chapters is titled with a Billy Beane quote that includes a swear word. (For most of the people in America, there is no longer any such thing as a swear word.) For the most part, it was rather dry without the humor Bill James tucked into his baseball books.