Bill James---the Man, the Legend

[sweaver]

With two new books out this spring (well, one-and-a-half) it seems a good time to discuss the author himself. Are you a fan? What is your favorite book by James? The least favorite? How do you think he will be remembered?

[Slippery Pedro]

Fan. For some reason, I'm partial to "This Time, Let's Not Eat The Bones."

Remembered? Not sure. He could be the most famous person who doesn't want to be famous and who goes out of his way not to be famous. If not the most, in the Top 25.

[SmedIndy]

Big fan. I loved his abstracts and player comments. I think he does he best writing there.

One phrase in Win Shares (that I saw when skimming it) honked me off, and I may just write him and Neyer about it....educated minds will guess what it was.

[Slippery Pedro]

Lemme guess Smed - something about pre-1900 players?

[SmedIndy]

actually, more about the era. And it was surprising, because James really started my interest in that time frame with his intelligent discourse on that era in the first Historical Abstract.

[Craig S.]

I don't always agree with him, but I think he has to go down as an incredibly important contributor to baseball analysis. Not only in what he says, but in the fact that I believe he's influenced a lot of other people to look at the statistics of the game in a more open and non-traditional manner.

[Slippery Pedro]

Originally posted by Craig S.
I don't always agree with him, but I think he has to go down as an incredibly important contributor to baseball analysis. Not only in what he says, but in the fact that I believe he's influenced a lot of other people to look at the statistics of the game in a more open and non-traditional manner.

Well said.

Smed - what page was the item on?

[SmedIndy]

I don't recall. It was a flippant comment to be sure. One of those tossed off things.

It was somewhere near the end of the essays.

[pathogan]

surprising at it might appear with my number phobia, I am a big fan, though I prefer his earlier abstarct to the current one. I used to get his annual by mail from someplace in I think it was Kansas?! then the first editions were on perforated papers. Believe it or not, I saw Norman Mailer recommend him before I had heard of him ...anyway, I like that he used to honk Sparky Anderson off so much about Lance Parrish...his comments are witty and fun,though he can lose me when he extrapolates too much

[gyb13]

"Influential"

[SmedIndy]

Originally posted by gyb13
"Influential"

"Seminal" would be good, too.

[Skip]

Seminal is perfect. I'm not the biggest James fan, but I certainly recognize his influence on our understanding of the game. No one has had more of an impact for those who look beyond surface value.

[KCBOOMER]

I am a big fan of James. His ability to elucidate his ideas in a clear and cogent fashion has been the seminal event in getting people to look at baseball from a fact driven perspective than a "gut feel" perspective.

I thoroughly enjoyed "The Price of Glory" on the HoF. His historical abstracts, particularly the first, is a masterpiece.

[sweaver]

A brief and incomplete publishing history:

James began selling articles to baseball magazines, such as Baseball Digest, on things like stolen bases against catchers. Eventually he began collecting notes on these things, photocopying them, and mailing them out to subscribers (like Pat, apparently. Cool!) These evolved into The Baseball Abstract, and annual publication from 1982-1988 published by Ballentine. After wearying of that format, James published The Baseball Book yearly from 1990-92.

In 1985, the first Historical Baseball Abstract came out. There followed books on managers, the Hall of Fame (The Politics of Glory) and a compilation of Abstract articles with the math taken out (This Time Let's Not Eat the Bones).

My favorite has to be the first HBA. I will admit to loving all of James' work, including the new NHBA, but there is something about first love.

I have all the 82-88 Abstracts and the TBBs too.

[richie17]

I have a link at my work pc of a site where someone's attempted to index everything Bill's done, it's really a good effort.

For me Bill James is everything in baseball. Coming to the game as a foreigner (England) I had no preconceptions of what was what, and through reading whatever I could find quickly found my way to James via Rob Neyer and John Sickels. Bought everything I could find, and still carry the old historical abstract with me wherever I go.

It's clear to me that Bill (and Pete Palmer to an extent) have had an enormous impact on the game. Certainly Bill is more of a historian to me than a statistician - he's really brought baseball's past to life, to the point that someone like me with no background in baseball or America can know a fair bit about the history of this great game.... (with a little help from Classic baseball at Stats.com that is, but even that was Bill's game!)

So yeah, he's superb isn't he?

Rich

[Ytown Tribe fan]

Been a big fan since the early Abstract days, but his historical essays have always been my favorites.

His essay "Revolution" is a great work, and he may have been the first writer to recognize that the true labor problems in baseball stem from the war between the big and small owners, more so than the war between al owners and the players.

James has had one huge influence on baseball -- he has gotten everyone (from broadcasters to fans) to realize the importance of OBP, as opposed to BA.

He pointed out once that the single biggest statistical correlation ever in baseball history is the correlation between a team's OBP and their runs scored (both relative to other teams in the league).

My guess is that Win Shares may someday be seen as the single best measure of a ballplayers worth ever. That day would be a long time coming, due to the number of steps required to calculate it, as opposed to the simple stats that get used every day.

Most people are instinctively suspicious of complicated formulas to describe simple things, such as how great a ballpayer was.

[Slippery Pedro]

Originally posted by Ytown Tribe fan
Most people are instinctively suspicious of complicated formulas to describe simple things, such as how great a ballpayer was.

Maybe more lazy about than suspicious of?

[moose]

Originally posted by Slippery Pedro
Maybe more lazy about than suspicious of?

Nah, I think it's more that people love objective proof when it favors their position, but overall, people don't live objective measurements about things they've already subjectively decided on...

[pathogan]

Originally posted by Slippery Pedro


Maybe more lazy about than suspicious of?

I do think, from expierence. that it can become too much of a numbers thing.people who are not sabermatricians are sort of held in contempt, beacuse they dont get the real story. And numbers crunchers alone sound like accountents{with no offense meant.} I think it is a very good, mostly accurate and still unperfected science.

[sweaver]

I think Bill James may be the most influential man in baseball in the last 25 years. Would we have Billy Beane without Bill James?

[Ytown Tribe fan]

One other thing Ithat occurred to me -- James showed the differences between what wins games and what people commonly THINK wins games, and that sometimes the difference is great and sometimes small.

To this day, even smart baseball guys like Joe Morgan sometimes go for the obvious instead of thinking it through.

Look at this year's Giants who, despite having Bonds, are little above average offensively, yet have a 9-2 record courtesy of a ridiculous 1.28 team ERA. Yet, all you hear is Barry this and Barry that.

James used to rail about two favorite themes: dumb MVP votes and dumb HoF votes. -- he finally gave up on it, sort of, to focus on baseball history and non-statistical essays on current events.

[moose]

Originally posted by sweaver
I think Bill James may be the most influential man in baseball in the last 25 years. Would we have Billy Beane without Bill James?

didn't billy beane come from the sandy alderson OBP camp? i (a) may be mistaken or (b) may be pointing our that sandy was influenced by BJ (?)

[sweaver]

I think you can draw a straight line there.

What sets James apart from other sabermetricians, to me, is that most of the current group thinks like mathematicians, while James thinks like a scientist. Too many just crunch numbers, without regard to what they mean. We have these endless "situation" stats, with sample sizes so small they don't mean anything, and all the endless variations on runs created or whatever, trying to reinvent the wheel.

James could look at a situation, evaluate it, and devise a logical method to study, measure, or explain it with an insight that no one else can match. The closest of today's crowd is probably the bunch at Baseball Prospectus, with a whole group working on it.

[Craig S.]

Originally posted by pathogan


I do think, from expierence. that it can become too much of a numbers thing.people who are not sabermatricians are sort of held in contempt, beacuse they dont get the real story. And numbers crunchers alone sound like accountents{with no offense meant.} I think it is a very good, mostly accurate and still unperfected science.

Well put. I think there has to be that balance between the numbers and the game, as much as they're intrinsically entwined. I've always thought that Bill James managed to not completely lose sight of the game itself and what it means. Approaching it only through stats, I think, takes away a little of its luster.

[Ytown Tribe fan]

Originally posted by Craig S.


Well put. I think there has to be that balance between the numbers and the game, as much as they're intrinsically entwined. I've always thought that Bill James managed to not completely lose sight of the game itself and what it means. Approaching it only through stats, I think, takes away a little of its luster.

Yes. He has said so many time, too.

Determining a ballplayer's greatness by stats alone is like determing a woman's beauty by her measurements alone.

[Rauseo]

Ytown.
uhm. Good Quote. I may steal it.


James is not the best Sabremtritian around now a days, I'm not sure who is. Possibly Voros, Mickey Litchman, or Clay Davenport I would think off hand. In fact in the 80's Bill wasn't the best, I'm pretty sure Pete Palmer was. What Bill WAS the best at was writing about Sabremetrics, and he still is one of the best, though the writing is MUCH better than the Sabremetrics now.

The reason the Win Shares book is lousy is because he does less real writing in that book than any other, and more sabremetrics, though the Sabremetric drivers in the book RC, Component ERA, and the defensive system are either not the best for their purpose (XR is MUCH better than RC, and DIPS is much better than Component ERA), or where published by someone else first Charlie Saeger (the defensive system).

[pwdennis]

Bill James was always great at putting into words the concepts that some of us intuitively knew but couldn't express.

I started getting hooked on the stats of baseball in 1964 when I was 12. At that time (before the first MacMillan Encyclopedia aka MAC I) the baseball reference source was Hy Turkin's OFFICIAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF BASEBALL which listed games played and batting averages (and not much else) , and WHO'S WHO IN BASEBALL. I noted that there were players (Eddie Yost, Eddie Stanky) who consistantly scored a lot of runs despite minimal power, relatively few hits and poor batting averages. While a poor hitter might have a lucky year and get knocked in virtually every time he gets on base, no one is that lucky every year. Even as a 12 year old I recognized that traditional stats were leaving something out and I suspected that the missing something was walks and HBPs , although that data was never available to me until I reached college age.

I also noted from the available literature that all the great hitters seemed to play in the 1920s and 1930s and that all the great pitchers played before 1920 and that hitting and pitching feats in the 1960s seemed to be inferior to those which had occurred earlier.

Similarly, despite vastly inferior BA, & SLG (and as I found out later OBP) Joe DiMaggio seemed to be a better RBI man than Ted Williams. Bill helped explain the differences in ballparks, playing conditions and contexts.


Bill James helped substitute an understanding for that which previously was little more than intuition. Were Bill James never to pen another word on our beloved sport, his place in the HOF of baseball writers would be secure