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Torrez, a Harvard-educated lawyer, begins his dressing-down of old-time baseball philosophy with a sentence designed to inflame the fan's emotions: "Everything you think you know about baseball is wrong." If the claim is incendiary, so is much of what follows. He picks apart the game's clichés (good teams do the little things effectively; pitching and defense win championships) and reassesses traditional statistical measurements to come up with new ones more apropos to the way the game is actually played these days. Take batting averages, for instance. If you want a real measurement of a hitter's contribution, according to the author, add his on-base percentage to his slugging average for an altogether new statistic that indicates how often a hitter fails against the types of hits he gets when he succeeds. Torrez then presents reasonable new ways to judge pitching and defense too, before reexamining the roles of the field manager and the GM.

So how did baseball wisdom get so out of joint? Torrez points his finger at an unholy trinity of media, management, and decision-making based on bottom lines. Power counts more, starters don't go the distance, relief pitching is at a premium--but the mythology perpetuated by the "trinity" would have us believe little baseball carries the day. "Most people don't understand the way baseball in the 1990s differs from baseball in the '60s, '70s, and '80s," he argues. Every page of Off Base invites you--even dares you--to argue back. And isn't that America's other national pastime? --Jeff Silverman

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11 Reviews 5 star:  (8) 4 star:  (1) 3 star:  (1) 2 star:    (0) 1 star:  (1)           Average Customer Review (11 customer reviews)		Share your thoughts with other customers:
Most Helpful Customer Reviews   4 of 4 people found the following review helpful: Highly recommended with an asterisk, January 7, 2000 By  NBO (Haslett, MI USA) - See all my reviews What a book! When was the last time you laughed OUT LOUD while reading a book about baseball? I highly recommend this book. I believe Mr. Torrez had three goals in writing this book. 1) to get folks who like baseball to develop the capacity for independent thought -- instead of simply repeating the traditional dogma, 2) to remind folks that the game "belongs" to any and all fans, not just the self (and media) appointed baseball elites, and 3) to pursuade the reader that his independent thoughts are correct. He immediately succeeds on the first and second, and is variably successful with the third. The first two are obviously more important anyway. The only thing that prevents me from giving this a score of 5 is Mr. Torrez's poor understanding of statistical interpretation (from a scientific point of view) which is a significant part of the book. To his credit, he tries to point out the difference between irrelevant and relevant statistics but in the process contradicts himself repeatedly and is simply wrong too often on matters of statistical interpretation. Some of his arguments are also a stretch just from a logical point of view. An incorrect premise often leads to an incorrect (at least indefensible) conclusion. These can be a bit annoying at times, but in a way, they promote the primary aim of the book -- to get people to think about baseball. I began to wonder if he might have introduced some of these errors in logic on purpose to pick-an-argument of sorts with the reader. Whether you agree with Torrez's conclusions or not, this is an excellent and entertaining book.  Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? (Report this)   2 of 5 people found the following review helpful: Buy Something More Original, December 28, 2001 By  David C. Walker "childswalker" (Baltimore, MD United States) - See all my reviews What a derivative collection of swill. It's not so much that Torrez's points are wrong as that almost every idea he presents as fresh has been bandied about for years by the true icons of baseball analysis: Pete Palmer, Bill James, Craig Wright, etc. As a longtime reader of those fellows, I thought, "Duh," over and over as I read this book. I guess it works OK for the generally uninitiated, but you'd be better off seeking the original sources than giving your money to this relative shyster.  Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you?