Fielder's Choice: Baseball's Best Shortstops

This book represents cutting-edge baseball analysis. A serious study of batting skills by a mathematician would be unusual enough. But a thinking-fan's sabermetric analysis of fielding skills is extremely rare.

FIELDER'S CHOICE suggests that Ozzie Smith and Rabbit Maranville are the best fielding shortstops ever. And at the end of the 2002 season, Omar Vizquel was the best active defensive shortstop and Derek Jeter was the worst.

Hounus Wagner and Cal Ripken Jr. are the best all-around shortstops of all time (both hitting and fielding). And Alex Rodriquez has a shot at displacing both of them.

But this book is about a lot more than just shortstops.

Babe Ruth and Ted Williams are the two most proficient hitters in baseball history. Barry Bonds is now the #6 hitter of all time and coming on fast. And Mike Piazza is the best hitting catcher ever.

These and many other interesting pieces of baseball lore emerge from this analysis of baseball?s numbers. Dr. Michael Hoban, a professor of mathematics, looks far beyond just who were the best shortstops.

In Part One of the book, Prof. Hoban introduces formulas and examines the players? numbers to determine who were the best defensive shortstops in baseball history.

In Part Two, the professor broadens his scope considerably and devises a whole new state-of-the-art system to tell us who were the best complete hitters in baseball during the 20th century. He calls this new metric Batting Proficiency (BP). It effectively combines on-base percentage, slugging average and runs-created to tell us who were the most complete hitters to ever play the game. And, unlike batting average or on-base percentage, once a player has completed ten full seasons, then his BP can only increase (not decrease).

In Part Three, Dr. Hoban classifies all the great hitters of the 20th century according to their Batting Proficiency and he also looks at the current players to see who are the best shortstops and who are the best hitters.

Whether you are a casual fan or a more serious follower of baseball, you want to read this book to see where today's cutting-edge baseball analysis has taken us.

Michael Hoban, Ph.D. is a serious baseball researcher and a professor of mathematics at Monmouth University in New Jersey. He is also professor emeritus of the City University of New York. He is a member of SABR (Society for American Baseball Research) and has been published in that society's prestigious annual, The Baseball Research Journal. He is the author of Baseball?s Complete Players - published by McFarland in 2000.