Baseball's All-Time Best Sluggers: Adjusted Batting Performance from Strikeouts to Home Runs »

Michael J. Schell is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of North Carolina and Director of the Biostatistics Core Facility in the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. He is the author of "Baseball's All-Time Best Hitters: How Statistics Can Level the Playing Field" (Princeton).

"The way these things work, I don't suppose that Michael Schell's book will be the final word on ranking hitters. What I do know is that anybody who wants the final word will have to read this book first. And that will be the easy part."—Rob Neyer, ESPN.com

"Michael Schell has expanded on his original study of Baseball's All-Time Best Hitters to include all aspects of batting. He has written a well thought out and soundly based book, taking into account sophisticated time, age, park and positional adjustments to reach valid conclusions. There is plenty of math, but it is not necessary to understand the intricacies of the equations to appreciate the results."—Pete Palmer, co-editor of The Baseball Encyclopedia (with Gary Gillette) and co-author of The Hidden Game of Baseball (with John Thorn)

"Well-written and organized. Baseball's All-Time Best Sluggersstrikes the right balance between the statistical lingo of the professional statistician and the more familiar verbiage of baseball books."—Daniel Levitt, co-author, with Mark Armour, of Paths to Glory: How Great Baseball Teams Got That Way

"Some say it's impossible to compare hitters from different eras. In this book, Michael Schell meets that challenge head-on, using modern statistical methods to adjust for differences in eras, ballparks, and the level of competition. It may not settle every argument about the game's best all-time hitters, but it's sure to raise the quality of those arguments."—Tom Tippett, Principal Designer, Diamond Mind Baseball

"A significant contribution to the sabermetrics field. This book will be a fun read for any baseball fan."—Jim Albert, Bowling Green State University.

"Everyone knows that batting .300 in the major leagues is much harder than batting .300 in the minors. Although baseball rules and equipment change over time and parks differ, such differences in difficulty are ignored regularly by those who compare batters who played in different decades and/or in different stadiums. Michael Schell has painstakingly made the needed adjustments for eras, for park factors, for players' ages, and for variability in performances, so as to determine which batters really have been most dominant. There are many other treasures to be found here, and many methodological lessons to be learned and enjoyed by baseball enthusiasts and by those who think about player evaluations."—Carl Morris, Harvard University

Christopher Shea - The Boston Globe

Michael J. Schell has produced what may be the most rigorous effort yet to compare baseball players from various eras. And in the process, he has offered a tantalizing suggestion that steroids may not have affected the game as much as many people assume.