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The Bullpen Book

We're proud to announce The Hardball Times's second publication, The Bullpen Book of 2002-2004. We weren't originally planning on publishing this book, but the data and the subject are so compelling that we feel it could make a real contribution to an important baseball topic.

The book kicks off with a reprint of Steve Treder's excellent review of the history of the bullpen relief ace, The Closer and the Damage Done. This article sets the stage for the issues that the rest of the book attempts to address.

Next is my article introducing Win Probability Added, which is the key concept underlying the stats in the rest of the book. Finally, there is a third, original article called Putting the Two Together, which explains the stats, why they're important, and highlights some of the trends over the past three years.

The entire book is 110 pages long, but the articles only comprise the first twenty pages. The other ninety pages are filled with statistical tables. For every reliever and every year over the past three years, we've listed the following:

We feel strongly that these stats are much more revealing and important than typical relief stats, such as saves and holds. And we think you'll agree once you spend some time with them. In case you missed it, we defined and discussed these stats in several previous articles:

• The One About Win Probability
• Team Bullpens
• Ranking the Relievers, and
• Closer

The Bullpen Book is available as an e-book. We haven't gone through a book printer, because we want to keep the costs down, and it's available in an Adobe Acrobat PDF file instead. If you don't own Adobe Acrobat, you can download it for free at the Adobe website. The price is $5.00 per book.

Here's how it works: click on the "Buy Now" button up above, and you'll be taken to a Paypal site. You don't have to be a Paypal member to buy the book, because they also accept major credit cards. Once your payment has been registered, I will email the PDF file to you. Because we're using these sales to try and support our purchase of baseball stats, we ask you to not share the file with others.

If you'd rather not pay for the book with a credit card, drop me an email, and we'll work out other arrangements.

We think The Bullpen Book is a new and insightful look at an aspect of baseball that continues to evolve to this day. Enjoy!