Corked : : Tales of Advantage in Competitive Sports

Locations
Call Number: 796 Lo, Adult Book / Nonfiction / Sports & Recreation / Sports / Miscellaneous
On Shelf At: Downtown Library, Malletts Creek Branch, Pittsfield Branch, Traverwood Branch

"“Corked” is an anthology of 26 short stories linked with the notion that factors outside of player talent can affect a team’s performance. Alternatively, one might also ask whether team selections, drafts, and trades are designed with the notion of acquiring the players with the best chance of superior performance with these factors in mind. This book contains stories that include the big 5 sports (football, baseball, hockey, basketball, and soccer) as well as track and field, yachting, tennis, golf, curling, and cricket among others. In some sports it’s easier to extract overachievement where there might be less standardization and more of a perceived home field advantage. This book includes offers perspective about how the fields, equipment, and other intangibles play into winning. It’s not simply about corked bats in baseball. The book is aimed at anyone who has a casual interest in sport. It is fun to sometimes think less about who is actually winning and losing and more about how the game is being played from a strategists or analysts level. The stories collected here in this book might empower the reader with more to talk about when parties devolve into a discussion about last night’s wins and losses for the home team." -- Amazon.com.

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Uneven But Has Intresting Info submitted by Meginator on August 23, 2020, 6:51pm This book is comprised of brief chapters that explore the idea of competitive advantage as it manifests within several different sports. Despite some grammatical inconsistencies and errors, the authors do a fairly good job of explaining the basic concepts and the book is accessible regardless of how much readers know about a given sport (though some knowledge certainly helps). The conceptual focus is a little uneven, with some chapters doing little more than explaining basic rules and techniques and others diving into data analysis and interpretation, and the definition of “advantage” is rather broad as it covers everything from outright cheating to natural variation in playing surfaces and home-field advantage. Nonetheless, the authors dig up quite a few unexpected and intriguing sources of competitive advantage, making the book an excellent jumping-off point despite its own inherent inconsistency.