Hardball Retrospective: Evaluating Scouting and Development Outcomes for the Modern-Era Franchises

Derek Bain

Jan 2015 · Tuatara Software, LLC

About this ebook

 Would your favorite baseball team make the playoffs if player X had not been traded? Imagine your team’s roster from any particular year. Remove all of the players that your team acquired through trades and free agency. Would you be able to field a competitive team? All right, let us re-populate the roster with every player that the organization originally drafted and signed. Yes, we will include undrafted free agents and foreign players who signed with their first Major League team, as well. How does the team stack up now? Is the club better or worse than the squad that you imagined at first?

In Hardball Retrospective, I placed every ballplayer in the modern era (from 1901-present)  on their original teams. Using a variety of advanced statistics and methods, I generated revised standings for each season based entirely on the performance of each team’s “original” players. I discuss every team’s “original” players and seasons at length along with organizational performance with respect to the Amateur Draft (or First-Year Player Draft), amateur free agent signings and other methods of player acquisition.  Season standings, WAR and Win Shares totals for the “original” teams are compared against the real-time or “actual” team results to assess each franchise’s scouting, development and general management skills. 

Edited by Marianne Landrum. Foreword by Don Daglow.

Ratings and reviews

A great what if read... If trades never took place how would your team have finished the year

About the author

 Derek Bain is a New Jersey native with a passion for baseball, statistics, computers and video games who enjoys spending quality time with his family. Hardball Retrospective: Evaluating Scouting and Development Outcomes for the Modern-Era Franchises was published in 2015 and received runner-up honors in the Shelf Unbound 2016 Best Indie Book contest. In “Hardball Retrospective: Evaluating Scouting and Development Outcomes for the Modern-Era Franchises”, I placed every ballplayer in the modern era (from 1901-2013) on their original team. I calculated revised standings for every season based entirely on the performance of each team’s “original” players. I discuss every team’s “original” players and seasons at length along with organizational performance with respect to the Amateur Draft (or First-Year Player Draft), amateur free agent signings and other methods of player acquisition. Season standings, WAR and Win Shares totals for the “original” teams are compared against the “actual” team results to assess each franchise’s scouting, development and general management skills. Expanding on my research for the book, I have written of articles for Fangraphs and Seamheads, revealing the teams with the biggest single-season difference in the WAR and Win Shares for the “Original” vs. “Actual” rosters for every Major League organization. “Hardball Retrospective” is available in digital format on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, GooglePlay, iTunes and KoboBooks. The paperback edition is available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble and CreateSpace. “Hardball Retrospective – Addendum 2014 to 2016” focuses on the results from those seasons while encompassing standings and statistics dating back to 2010 (available in Amazon Kindle format only). Supplemental Statistics, Charts and Graphs along with a discussion forum are offered at TuataraSoftware.com.