"Human beings almost always have to try to attach a cause to what they view as an effect, when many times there is no real cause." Those are the words of Eddie Epstein, former baseball executive and co-author of Baseball Dynasties, written with espn.com columnist Rob Neyer. Epstein and Neyer are stat-hounds, a class of baseball fan often mocked as unimaginative eggheads. Stat-hounds are so enamored of raw numbers that they frequently harbor unpopular ideas, such as preferring Gary Carter to Roger Maris, or believing that the '27 Yankees were anything other than the greatest team of all time. But who are the real fools? The cruel logic of arithmetic disputes the concept of, for example, the "clutch hitter," but mainstream sports writers blindly embrace the cliché, as if afraid to crunch the numbers. Baseball Dynasties crunches plenty, in tandem with rigorous study of baseball's seemingly unimpeachable greats. Epstein and Neyer subject 15 legendary teams, from the '06 Cubs to the '98 Yankees, to statistical comparisons that aren't shaded by regional bias or rosy sentiment. In particular, the duo judges teams based on something called a Standard Deviation Score, which indicates not only how well a club outscored its opponents in a given time period, but how it did so in relation to the rest of the league at the time. The margins of Baseball Dynasties feature the requisite colorful anecdotes about Yogi Berra and Reggie Jackson, but the book's core text is devoted to mathematically provable arguments, many as brazen as they are convincing. Neyer does this almost every day in his espn.com column—which features some of the smartest and liveliest baseball writing outside of Thomas Boswell and Roger Angell—and many of the asides in Baseball Dynasties will be familiar to Neyer devotees. Classic memories of World Series "turning points" (Buckner's error, Amoros' catch) are challenged objectively. Hall of famers' true credentials are scrutinized. The value of the batting average is patently ridiculed. The point of all this contrariness is to evaluate the beauty of baseball without getting suckered in by flashy superstars, half-remembered legends, or unprovable "truths." Ultimately, the last word in applying logic to a game of art belongs to Epstein, who notes that "so much of what happens in baseball is just random deviation from an unobservable mean." To a rational person, that's poetry.