The Hidden Game of Baseball

work by Thorn and Palmer

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July 20, 2026

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"The Hidden Game of Baseball" by John Thorn and Pete Palmer is a seminal work in the field of sabermetrics, which is the statistical analysis of baseball data. The book, published in 1984, popularized concepts like "linear weights," aiming to provide more accurate measures of player performance than traditional statistics. It challenged conventional baseball wisdom by emphasizing objective, data-driven insights into the game. The book's influence contributed to a broader shift in how baseball is analyzed and understood, moving towards a more scientific approach to evaluating players and strategies.1

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sabermetrics
Bill James and the advent of sabermetrics
Two years later The Hidden Game of Baseball, coauthored by John Thorn and sabermetrician Pete Palmer, was published. In addition to summarizing a number of the key sabermetric principles known at the time, it also popularized “linear weights,” which essentially hearkened back to Lane’s work of many decades…
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Two years later The Hidden Game of Baseball, coauthored by John Thorn and sabermetrician Pete Palmer, was published. In addition to summarizing a number of the key sabermetric principles known at the time, it also popularized “linear weights,” which essentially hearkened back to Lane’s work of many decades…
Read More