Thoreau remarked in Walden: “It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.”
I delivered this speech at a SABR regional meeting in Boston in 2006 as a stand-in for Bill James, who had to cancel but whose talk was read by Tom Tippett. [https://goo.gl/FRnBVW]. Still apt, I think.
My sabermetric achievements (Total Baseball, The Hidden Game of Baseball) lie behind me rather than ahead, and, echoing Paul Gallico’s Farewell to Sport, I think am now about ready to say, “Farewell to Stats.” For a whole generation of fans and fantasy players, stats have begun to outstrip story and that is a sad thing. Even the unverifiable balderdash that passed for fact or informed opinion in baseball circles not so long ago seems today wistfully enticing. Where is Bill Stern now that we really need him? Maybe Lincoln did not tell Doubleday with his dying breath to “keep baseball going; the country needs it.” So what — Lincoln did invent Thanksgiving as a national holiday in 1863 for similarly “restorative” reasons, to create around Plymouth Rock a myth of national origins … sound familiar? Like Albert Spalding and Abner Graves and the Mills Commission? Frankly, in today’s baseball writing I miss the wink and the nudge of a Barnum or the tall-tale bluster of a Davy Crockett; lying has left the sports page for the front page and both are worse off. The romance is out of the game now; nostalgia is simply a blunt weapon with which to land blows upon Barry Bonds, build retro ballparks, or sell vintage jerseys.
For this I could blame Bill James, Pete Palmer, and maybe myself a little too. The press has often termed me a sabermetrician and placed me in the company of my betters. In fact I never was a statistician; I just believed that in numbers one might uncover truths not visible to the naked eye, in the way that flying at night a pilot must trust the instrument panel rather than his senses. Even early on, what interested me more than fiddling with formulas or lobbying for Ron Santo to enter the Hall of Fame was the web of illusion that stats created for fans and players alike, evading the interesting questions of why we measure, what we think we are measuring, what we are truly measuring, what is left unmeasured and, most important, what the measurement means.
Cap Anson is said to have wished for his epitaph to read: “Here lies a man who batted .300” (in fact his tombstone reads: “He played the game”) — so to him a .300 batting average meant excellence. Today we know that everything is relative, including relativity, so we can’t responsibly say what a .300 batting average means without bringing in the now obvious deficiencies of that metric, as well as the league batting average, and the home park advantage, and the question of average skill levels over time. In The Hidden Game Pete and I used this example: “The National League batting average of .266 in 1902 does not mean the same thing as the American League batting average of .266 in 1977, any more than Willie Keeler’s .336 in 1902 means the same thing as Lyman Bostock’s .336 in 1977…. Keeler’s and Bostock’s Relative Batting Averages are identical, which signifies that each player exceeded his league’s performance to the same degree. But the question that is begged is ‘How do we measure average skill: What do the .266s of 1902 and 1977 mean?’”
Today I find those questions less gripping. To count the constituent parts of baseball is to run the gamut of the game’s charms from A to B. Not long ago someone thoughtfully provided a list of the all-time leaders in receiving Intentional Bases on Balls with no one on base. This put me in mind of Thoreau’s remark in Walden: “It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.” Fixate on the particular and you miss the sublime. And while we’re on a quoting jag, there’s Einstein’s “Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts.” True, so true. Yet in an Abner Doubleday twist, there is no evidence that Einstein ever said this. The words were observed on a sign hanging in his office at Princeton and may first have been uttered by Bill Stern.
Statistics are something of a fetish. Like a shrunken head a stat is an encapsulation of a power once alive. It serves to recall and revivify the past, and sometimes to transform the future. When David Neft’s team that developed the landmark Macmillan Baseball Encyclopedia unearthed nineteenth-century RBIs and dead-ball ERAs, Roger Connor, Sam Thompson, and Addie Joss won hall of Fame plaques after years out in the cold because the areas of their accomplishment were not measured. Once saves began to be measured after 1960, relief pitchers gained prestige, were compensated differently, and eventually began to be used differently (with indifferent results, I might add) so as to produce more save opportunities for a designated closer.
What are the outcomes of sabermetrics on the field to date? As general managers and managers came to understand that outs and runs were the currency of the game, as they had been from the very start, they began to value on base percentage. Pitch count was not merely a way to preserve your own pitchers’ arms, it was also a weapon: by working the count a manager might force the hand of his opposing number and sooner get to the middle relievers, exposing the soft underbelly of nearly every staff. Today it is probable that we overvalue walks where formerly they had been undervalued, and we scorn risky baserunning when once it was the prime delight of players and fans. The charm of the grand old game is that it appears to be the same as it ever was, or at least the same as in McKinley’s day, but it has changed radically of course. In terms of strategy it is hardly about baserunning and fielding at all, though recent sabermetric work in these areas may alter the balance yet again.
This is all interesting stuff to me still. Generally speaking, though, in matters of baseball’s history as well as its statistics, what is objectively true is no longer as intriguing to me as what people may believe to be true, and why. I remain interested in statistics not as indices of merit but as artifacts of play to which story adheres. As the tangible — and, as opposed to narrative history, unmediated — remains of games contested long ago, records transform play into a common experience repeatable at fixed intervals … which is not a bad way to define a rite or ritual. “People preserve their thousand-year-old experiences in the world of play,” wrote philosopher Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. And in the words of Michael Novak, “Believers in sport do not go to sports to be entertained; to plays and dramas, maybe, but not to sports. Sports are far more serious than the dramatic acts, much closer to primal symbols, metaphors, and acts, much more ancient and frightening.”
The old mysteries were visible in baseball’s earliest names, numbers, and practices, and it has seemed to me in recent years that to understand the action on the field, most of which we have elected to measure, we might profit from peeling back the layers of complexity and examining, with the same intensity we may devote to stats, some of the game’s most fundamental terms: say, base and ball and home and run; and such odd linguistic vestiges as box and score; and the blatant misnomers pitch and diamond. As all Americans came from somewhere else, so did these names, from other games and times and places.
Our starting point for such investigations is the basic word play, which derives from the Germanic verb plegan, which means “to pledge” and refers to that bête noire of baseball, the wager. In all games worth their salt, something of worth is placed at risk, whether it is treasure or honor. Without this pledge, victory and defeat are one and the same. My source for this useful bit is the classic study Homo Ludens (1938) by Swiss historian Johan Huizinga. The title of this work means “Man the Player,” and Lude is a root of all sorts of words signifying escape and evasion: elude, preclude, include, exclude, delude, etc. It should come as no surprise that the basic field games before bats and balls and other implements came into play involved chaotic running and chasing and capturing a flag, a tower, a prisoner. Running remained the primary attraction of early ball games, too, until the orderly game of cricket shifted the emphasis to the field and the bat. The name “Cricket” derived from early terms for the bat; other games of ball would similarly take their names from their prime implement or feature: hand ball, foot ball, trap ball, cat ball, base ball.
Cricket became the first organized bat and ball game played in North America. A match was held on April 29, 1751, by a company of Londoners against a company of New Yorkers; it was played for “a considerable Wager,” according to the New-York Post-Boy, with “those who got most Notches in two Hands, to be the Winners.” When today’s reporter notes that Greg Maddux has just notched his fifth win, by a score of 6–2, he unwittingly tips his cap to the archaic practice of scoring a wooden stick with a penknife for each run. In another pleasant archaism, if Maddux’s opponent was knocked “out of the box,” he was driven from an enclosure that had ceased to exist after 1892.
Cricket’s fifteenth-century name had been “Hondyn and Hondoute” (Hand in and Hand Out), signifying that there was then an In side and an Out side. Early baseball box scores registered only runs and outs which, whether made at the bat or on the bases, were recorded as Hands Lost or Hands Out. The vestigial prints of other games are all over the rise of baseball.
When baseball began it was primarily a game for runners and fielders rather than batsmen; the pitcher (who ceased to “pitch” by 1872 as the underarm toss began its inexorable drift toward overhand throwing) was an insignificant feeder of balls delivered for the batter’s convenience. The game of baseball took its name from its hallmark feature: safe havens where a runner could not be put by a ball thrown at his person, as was the custom in baseball prior to 1845. The base symbolized a bay or harbor and was a feature of ancient board games such as Pacheesi (we know it as Parcheesi thanks to Parker Brothers) long before it came into field games; the circuit of the base paths evoked the Return Myth of Odysseus and others. Originally “base” was a running game (absent bat and ball, those time-honored symbols of the male and female principles) that was well known when cricket was young. Spenser, in his “Faerie Queen,” alluded to it as follows: “So ran they all as they had been at bace, They being chased that did others chace.” The innovation of baseball was to combine the running of that old game with the batting of cat and the fielding of cricket.
Baseball has never been played on a diamond, which would have two acute angles and two obtuse ones; in fact it has been played in a circular pattern on a square that was turned on point. Town Ball games were played on irregular pentagonal schemes, with four bases plus a striker’s point, but the circular course of the base paths was evidenced in the original name for what came to be known as the Massachusetts Game: round ball. (The name did not refer gratuitously to the shape of the ball.)
What about that evocative name “Home”? Well, Ulysses returned home to Ithaca to complete his earthly circuit. The rest of us go to our eternal reward, returning to Our Maker, as I believe is indicated by baseball’s home. Some national variants of the game of Hop Scotch are illustrative. In England and America the end space is termed Home; in Germany it is called Paradise; in Austria it is the Temple; in France too the end space is Paradise or, with echoes for our national game, the Elysian Fields.
Baseball is a backward-looking game, in which every action on the field resonates against plays imprinted — in the mind’s eye, in the collective memory, and in the record books — long ago. The game came to the fore because it was adapted to the conditions of early national life; it changed as those conditions were altered. The taste of other days sustained a game marked by running and fielding; the taste of our day is for the contest of pitcher and hitter. It has been a long while since a home run generally involved running.
Baseball fans of earlier generations had fewer statistics at their disposal but a simpler game perhaps had no need of them. Our forebears’ very lack of stats may have made them more sociable and more cooperative enthusiasts than those of today, made possessive and isolated by fantasy baseball and constant numerical evaluation of their favorites. Ultimately, the statistical fragments that were once saved in scrapbooks, or the new measures devised by ingenious fans, become relics which remind us at every moment that our youth was a wonderful if remote time.
So, for me, “Farewell to Stats.” But maybe not to Sabermetrics, whose definition has been disputed ever since Bill James coined the term. I believe in what Bill described in 1981 as a hallmark of the approach — to present new evidence from original source material rather than simply shuffling the existing data to make one’s point. This seems to me to go beyond statistics to describe reasonably well the kind of work I do — though admittedly absent the metrics.
Apart from family, what now seems important to me is play, a more serious activity than work and one that reveals more about who we are or wish to be. And the work that seems most like play to me is rummaging around in history’s attic, often emerging into the light empty-handed only to discover what was in plain sight all along.
Zanzibar Cats was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.