June 2006 Cover Courtesy: Stanford University Press Inside The Wages of Wins • Dick Friedman's review | Read an excerpt | Buy it Hot Off The Press The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup By Matt Weiland, Sean Wilsey ($14.95). A guide to the nations competing in the 2006 World Cup featuring short essays that explain soccer's importance in each country and the personality of its people. Mario Tailgates NASCAR Style By Mario Batali ($19.95). The Food Network chef shares some of his regional favorites and classic grilling recipes for the NASCAR tailgater. Feeding the Monster: How Money, Smarts, and Nerve Took a Team to the Top By Seth Mnookin ($26). One of golf's best instructors breaks down the basics of the game with tips and drills for improvement. Atlas: From the Streets to the Ring: A Son's Struggle to Become a Man By Teddy Atlas, Peter Alson ($24.95). Boxing trainer Teddy Atlas writes about his life, from his own experience as a street brawler to his stints training Mike Tyson and Michael Moorer. Exotic Betting: How to Make the Multihorse, Multirace Bets that Win Racing's Biggest Payoffs By Steven Crist ($24.95). Learn how to maximize profits by betting on exotic wagers including the daily double, exacta, trifecta, quinella, superfecta, pick 3, 4, and 6. Five Under $5 Think words are cheap? These books won't break your bank (prices from amazon.com): • Let Me Tell You a Story: A Lifetime in the Game By John Feinstein, Red Auerbach ($8.98). Feinstein accompanies and writes about Auerbach's weekly lunch group that includes journalists, secret service agents, former basketball coaches, and lifelong friends. • Summer of '98 By Mike Lupica ($3.98). One of baseball's top writers dicusses the magical summer of '98 and how it helped rekindle fans' love of baseball. • The Greatest Game Ever Played: Harry Vardon, Francis Ouimet, and the Birth of Modern Golf By Mark Frost ($4.98). The inside story of the 1913 U.S. Open, which pitted Vardon and Ouimet, which many consider the greatest golf match of all time. • One Magical Sunday: But Winning Isn't Everything By Phil Mickelson, Donald T. Phillips ($4.98). Mickelson recounts the 2004 Masters, his first ever win at a Major. • I've Got Your Back: Coaching Top Performers, From Center Court to the Corner Office By Brad Gilbert, With James Kaplan ($4.98). Former tennis great and ex-coach of Andre Agassi and Andy Roddick gives tips for the tennis court that are also practical in the corporate world.

By Dick Friedman, SI.com

Adam Smith, meet Joe Smith. The Wages of Wins: Taking Measure of the Many Myths in Modern Sport (Stanford Business Books, 304 pages, $29.95), by economists David J. Berri, Martin B. Schmidt and Stacey L. Brook, already has achieved crossover status with reviews in The New Yorker (by best-selling Blink author Malcolm Gladwell, no less) and the New York Times business section. Acknowledging their debt to the best-seller Freakonomics, which applies economic theory and research techniques to knotty everyday problems, the authors attempt to bring their computer-driven statistical methods to bear on sports. "One can both play and watch basketball for a thousand years," they write. "If you do not systematically track what the players do, and then uncover the statistical relationship between these actions and wins, you will never know why teams win and why they lose."

By and large, they succeed. Wages is provocative, stimulating and challenging. (In every way: For instance, you'll probably learn more about regression analysis than you wanted to know.) Among their many conclusions: Labor disputes do not threaten the future of professional sports; victories, not star power, draw fans to NBA games; and better players do not generally raise their games in the playoffs.

The largest section of the book details the authors' system for rating the productivity of NBA players, distilled for each into a "Win Score." Crucial is the authors' grasp that each possession is an asset to be harvested, prolonged or squandered. Thus, one-dimensional, turnover-prone gunners like Allen Iverson, Antoine Walker and Ben Gordon get severely downgraded, no matter how many points they stick in. (In 2003-04, the authors rate perennial All-Star and onetime MVP Iverson, who achieves a grand total of 0.9 wins produced, as the league's 227th best player!) Meanwhile, well-rounded big men like Kevin Garnett (the league's most productive player in '03-04 and 04-05, say the authors) and solid rebounders like Tyson Chandler get a boost. This is partly because they represent a scarce commodity -- the phrase endlessly trotted out is that there is a "short supply of tall people." In sum, if you're choosing a Wallace, take Ben, not Rasheed. The argument is closely and convincingly reasoned, but sometimes -- especially if you've already seen the Answer repeatedly go 11 for 35 on his way to getting his 32 -- you simply want to exclaim, "Well, ye-eah!"

When it turns to the NFL, Wages presents a finding that should scare anyone currently assembling a fantasy roster. In a chapter titled "How Are Quarterbacks Like Mutual Funds?" the authors answer by asserting that "past performances are no guarantee of future returns" -- particularly when "only 10 percent of what a quarterback does this year is explained by what he did last year." (It's frightening how inconsistent Brett Favre is under this system.) So, for better or worse, please disregard those '05 numbers, you Drew Brees and Donovan McNabb fans.

The authors make their arguments clearly and with a minimum of jargon. And the tone is light. They are patently fans as well as economists. "You can't know who won the game if you don't look at some numbers," they write. "Well, that is not entirely true. You could wait to see who was happy or sad when the game ended, although for legendary Pistons coach Chuck Daly that lesson may not work. Daly never looked that happy, even when his team won an NBA championship." Such mild yuks notwithstanding, your feelings about this book may be akin to those you have toward your car. Do you want to know how it runs, or do you just want to drive it?

Sports executives, however, ignore The Wages of Wins at their peril. "Unfortunately, without the proper statistical tools, many teams are left in the dark," the authors declare. So the next time your favorite team's GM is talking about tendering a maximum contract to that ball-hogging trey chucker, you might send him a copy.

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