Joe Peta Trading Bases Sparknotes

Reading is a fundamental activity that can stimulate the minds of readers and allow them to escape reality even for just a chapter or two; or for some, nothing is more dreadful. As someone who typically identifies with the latter, I was shocked to find that I couldn’t put Trading Bases by Joe Peta down. I enjoyed the book for many reasons including:
Trading Bases is a very interesting story in which Joe Peta shares his experience on the trading floors of Wall Street and how it helped him profit from betting on baseball games. Peta suffered a broken leg after ironically being run into by an ambulance. During time spent at home waiting for his leg to heal Peta created a strategy to bet on baseball games. Peta uses players’ statistics and advanced

To most people these numbers are confusing and make no sense, but to the hardcore fans these stats can have a lot of value. Joe Peta uses these statistics, along with sabermetrics, as the center piece of his experience when collecting data on various teams. Sabermetrics is the statistical analysis of baseball data that creates stats for players beyond batting average and homeruns, including how many runs a defensive player saves or wins players create for their team over a replacement level player. After factoring in information based on a player’s previous performances, as well as their age, their future performance can be predicted and suggest the specific ways in which they will help their team. Based on this information it can be known how many runs a team should score and how many runs they should allow. By knowing these two numbers Peta is able to use baseball statistician and analysist Bill James’ “Pythagorean theorem” in order to find a team’s winning percentage for the upcoming season. While James’ formula only provides Peta with predictions, due to teams under performing, over performing, or be plagued by injuries. Regardless, it is a good start. Peta is able to create a stat of his own in order to measure a player’s luck and how this luck correlates to the player’s

Peta tells multiple stories from his past experiences on Wall Street and how he learned from those situations to make smart bets. Peta often begins a chapter by telling a story of a past experience and then follows it up by making a connection to how it relates to his betting strategies in baseball. One story that Peta shares demonstrates his creation of a market. The market created is a betting pool consisting of his coworkers using professional football teams’ win-loss records. Peta also shares about a time in his career when he followed baseball’s example of statistics production to create similar stats in the place he worked to get a better measure of employees in order to create a more productive and efficient workplace. It is interesting how Peta shares his stories and connects them to other areas as it gives the book more depth making it about more than just baseball or trading