The Numbers Game by Alan Schwartz
I actually got this book back in November and finally started reading it last night. It's really interesting. It details the origin of baseball's obsession with statistics. I'm only about a 1/3 of the way into it, but so far there have been some really interesting stories or quotes. I feel like I'm one of those kids talking about a book on the Reading Rainbow. Anyway, some points of interest...

The ideology of Moneyball, found all the way back around the turn of the century...
"When you can't express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind" - Lord Kelvin (1824-1907)

"I really don't care much about baseball, or looking at ball games. All my interest in baseball is in its statistics." - Ernie Lanigan

Paul DePodesta's great-great-grandfather?

"Without records, we would have merely a series of exhibitions, meaningless after the game was over...They give permanency to the game which it could never otherwise enjoy." - John Heydler, NL Secretary in the 1910s.

This explains why stat geeks like me have always been around. It's why we're drawn to baseball over other sports.

The first record of anybody dismissing batting average as the best tool to measure a player's skill...

"Would a system that placed nickels, dimes, quarters, and 50-cent pieces on the same basis be much of a system whereby to compute a man's financial resources? And yet it is precisely such a loose, inaccurate system which obtains in baseball...Pretty poor system, isn't it, to govern the most popular department of the most popular of games?" - Ferdinand Cole Lane

F.C. Lane also described batting averages as "worse than worthless". He also wanted to explore the affects of parks like the Polo Grounds vs. Boston or Cincinnati on individual statistics. This is a man who was waaaaaaaay ahead of his time. F.C. Lane had all of these ideas in the 1910s, well before Branch Rickey and Bill James.

From there a series of formulas were used to represent what we currently call "slugging percentage". F.C. Lane broke down the statistics of Jake Daubert and Cactus Cravath. Daubert was a slap hitter and Cravath was a power hitter (at least for the time). Daubert hit .301 while Cravath hit .285. Cravath had 24 HR to Daubert's 2 and 31 doubles to Daubert's 8. Given the new formula, it was apparent that Cravath was a more valuable hitter than Daubert. Obviously, this angered many people around baseball at the time.

This book is a really good read, especially if you're interested in baseball statistics and their origins. I don't mean to take anything away from Branch Rickey or Bill James, but the fact that the nacency of some of their ideas can be traced back so long ago is remarkable to me.