The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract

"Baseball and statistics traditionally go together. One of my inspirations to become a statistician was reading The Bill James Baseball Abstracts. I can’t remember what Bill James did before, but he had an unusual career: I believe he was a nightwatchman. He was not employed by any baseball team or academic organisation. He just, on his own, decided he wanted to study baseball statistics. He wrote a series of books called The Baseball Abstracts that became widely published, starting in 1982, and became cult classics. In these books he mixes in stories about baseball and goofy statistics – which in the pre-ESPN era weren’t widely available – with in-depth analysis of questions such as, which is more important: Speed or power? At what age are baseball players most productive? People had looked at that before, and apparently there was baseball lore which said baseball players are most productive between the ages of 28 and 32. Bill James looked at the statistics, and it did look like players between the ages of 28 and 32 were the best players. But then he looked more carefully and it turned out that that wasn’t really true, that there was a selection effect. That the players who were staying past the age 30 ­– which is actually an advanced age in baseball years – were actually the best players. And if you look at the individual players, it turned out that they were mostly peaking around the age of 27. The conventional wisdom was wrong, and it was wrong because people weren’t directly asking the question that they should have been asking. Bill James was amazing, because when he wanted to ask a specific question he focused right in on that, which is the opposite of how people used to do baseball statistics. He also studied – and baseball fans will care about this – the Chicago Cubs, who traditionally perform very badly, and whether that was because they are the only team that still plays a lot of day games. Was that hurting them? Most teams now play at night. Were the Cubs tired because they were playing a lot of day games? I think so. If it were true that the Cubs were getting exhausted from playing day after day in the hot sun, you’d expect them to perform worse nearer the end of the season. I think he did find that was the case. Yes. He just put a lot of effort into it and worked hard. I think it also helps, when you start to publish, that you become part of a community. In the early books he talks a lot about just getting the data. He created an organisation called Project Scoresheet, where all these people would gather the data on all the baseball games and send it to each other. It was only possible because he really cared. I’m a baseball fan but I don’t care like that. But it’s still worth reading: like any good writer, if they’re obsessed with something it’s fun to read and share their obsession. After a while his abstracts started to go downhill: I felt he started falling in love with his own voice. He started getting more about opinion and less about fact. Then he stopped with the annual Abstracts and started doing other things, which I think was a good decision."

"Bill is a very good friend of mine. He was always a baseball fan, but in the 1970s he started looking at baseball and asking all these questions about the game. Was it really the way people described it, in terms of the strategy of the game and the focus of the game? He found that in many, many ways it was not. And he just started writing about it. He’s a brilliant writer. The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract is his big thing; it’s an entire history of baseball. There’s a section where he goes through decade by decade, telling all the biggest stories about the game. There’s another section where he picks the 100 greatest players in every position – so the 100 greatest catchers, the 100 greatest first basemen and so on. This could be extremely dry, but Bill takes it as an opportunity to tell 1,900 different stories. I’ve read the book cover-to-cover, but even more than that, I’ve read some parts of the book a thousand times. I’ve picked it up, turned to a page and started reading about, say, the 23rd-best second baseman. The stories are just so wonderful, and Bill’s mind is just so remarkable. It’s a great book. There are certainly sections that are number-oriented, sections where he explains how he does the rankings, and things like that. But this one is actually not so much a numbers book – not in the way I look at it. It’s mostly these amazing stories about people. For every player there is a story about a drunken episode that he got into, or a fight that he got into, or some good deed that he was constantly doing, how he was constantly taking care of his mother while he was playing, et cetera. It’s really this amazing collection of baseball stories, which is why I love it. I do have a bent for some of the baseball numbers, and enjoy looking at those, but if I’m just sitting down to read, that wouldn’t necessarily be what I would go for. This is different. In some ways Bill has probably gotten a bad rap, because people tend to think that’s all he does, when actually his best work has no numbers in it at all."