Bill James is a fantastic writer on so many levels. At the first, I guess most well-known level, he basically created the baseball sub-pastime known as sabermetrics* which seeks to ferret out truths about the game through sophisticated statistical analysis. This has led to many innovations over the past 30 years, particularly documented in the Michael Lewis book Moneyball (chances of showing up as a later review: near 100%) but all over the place. If you’ve noticed that sportswriters like Peter Gammons talk about players in terms of OPS instead of RBIs, you can thank Bill James for that.
On another, deeper level though, he’s just such a good writer. His travel into baseball analysis is kind of an off-kilter one; where you might expect him to have a background in math or at least economics, the fact of the matter is that when he published his original Abstracts in the 1970s he was an English teacher in Kansas. It’s not coincidental, I don’t think, that he ended up being the guy who kick-started the movement where other people at the time and before (and there were others) failed. Bill James has a habit of hooking you in with some great stories, and along the way you learn about the advanced statistical analysis as well.
Of particular interest at least to me in this book was a biography he put together of 1930s and 40s catcher Ernie Lombardi, the kind of guy who is never going to have an autobiography written about him but who nonetheless led an interesting, baseball-dominated life. James spends a few thousand words on this in Lombardi’s entry. All in all, he catalogs the top 100 players at each position in this book and gives you *something* about them. The more contemporary players, the sort of people that even a casual baseball fan might already recognize, might have a quick little blurb or a list contextualizing the player against others in baseball history. For a lot of the older guys, though, you get biographical information or some neat anecdotes. James is a great storyteller and each of these entries are worth reading in their own right. And he also manages to offer some interesting life lessons in his study of players.
That’s the second half of the book. The first half covers each and every decade of baseball history, covering a wide panoply of topics such as the tallest, shortest, fattest, and skinniest players, the best players of every ten year period, and the particular problems that the game was having at the time. Although there is a sense that baseball is this monolithic, unchanging structure, the fact is that the game is far different today than it was in the 1930s and in turn it was much different in the 30s than in the 1870s. Another neat thing James does in this first section is he takes several stories from each decade which he thinks would make a good movie. Some of these, you might already know, like the 1919 Black Sox scandal that was later turned into a book by Eliot Asinof** and a screenplay written by John Sayles. Others are much more obscure but no less compelling, for example the story of the 1871 Chicago White Stockings, who literally found themselves without a home in midsummer because of the Great Chicago Fire.
To some contemporary sabermetricians – “statheads” as they like to call themselves – Bill James is a bit out of date. The methodology of his statistical work is not the greatest, for instance (which you might expect given his background; if anything, it’s surprising how well he’s done). For this reason I wouldn’t quite call him the Carl Sagan of sabermetrics. That being said, in my opinion he’s an even better pure writer than Sagan. If you have anything approximating an interest in baseball, you’ll probably enjoy this book.
*He did literally create the word, which is a portmanteau of the Society for Baseball Research (SABR) and “metrics”.
**Chances of later review: also high.
A Book A Day, That's All We Ask 