The Diamond Appraised is a book on
baseball written by
Craig Wright, a baseball theorist or
sabermetrician, and
Tom House, an ex-pitcher and then major league pitching coach. When it was published in 1989, it was quite
groundbreaking in its scientific approach to baseball; in some sense, it was the successor to
Bill James'
Baseball Abstracts, which ended in 1988.
Most of the book is written by Wright, and hence is mostly of interest to fans of an analytic approach to baseball. But House's sections, which are mostly responses to essays by Wright, provide insight into how people inside baseball - players, managers, and executives - view the results and recommendations of sabermetrics.
Contained within the book is perhaps the first scientific study of the results of a heavy workload on pitcher effectiveness. This topic recently become a focus of study for the Baseball Prospectus, the modern day equivalent of the old Baseball Abstracts; Keith Woolner and Rany Jazayerli wrote an excellent essay in the 2001 BP citing The Diamond Appraised as the original impetus for study of pitcher workloads. Jazayerli in a recent interview recommended Diamond as one of the 5 most important studies of baseball.