First in a new series, with new criteria
Last year I offered at Our Game a series of 20 essays about baseball pioneers — largely ethnic, racial, gender, and disability heroes (https://bit.ly/4aEsnvd). For this season I extend that idea to those who, behind the scenes, have had a profound impact on the game — the way we play it and understand it. A Hall of Fame plaque will not be enough to make the team, nor will meritorious contributions to baseball writing or broadcasting.
This time around, my selections represent those who have built things of enduring value. For me, first among these is Bill James, not for a particular statistical innovation but for the habits of mind — skepticism, reason, empiricism, rigor — that produced all of them: in short, analysis based on evidence.
Nearly 40 years ago I observed that James had “revolutionized the way fans think about the game and the way professionals write about it.” Since then, he has altered how talent is evaluated in front offices and how it is arrayed in the field. The game is better because of him.
James was a night watchman in the Stokely-Van Camp baked-bean plant in Lawrence, Kansas. “I’d spend five minutes an hour making sure the furnaces didn’t blow up,” he later recalled, “and 55 minutes working on my numbers.” The result was the 1977 Baseball Abstract — Featuring 18 Categories of Statistical Information that You Just Can’t Find Anywhere Else. The 68-page pamphlet sold 70 copies via mail order for $3.50 apiece, plus 50 cents for postage. Sales rose to 780 copies of the 1978 Abstract and, after an article in Esquire, spiked to about 2,200. He continued to work on the loading dock for at least a year after that.
In 1981 Dan Okrent profiled him in Sports Illustrated and Ballantine Books offered a book contract. James began publishing the Abstract nationally, and it became a New York Times bestseller. Teens who read him grew up to work in baseball, including Theo Epstein, whose Boston Red Sox hired him before the 2003 season. Breaking the “Curse of the Bambino” — no World Series titles since his sale to the Yankees — James and the Bosox won four World Series rings during his tenure.
I remember the boyhood arguments about who was the better New York center fielder. Voices would rise until one of us would declare the matter settled in favor of Willie, Mickey, or the Duke: “Because I said so!” Then another kid would be sure to howl, “Oh yeah? Prove it!” And wielding such cudgels as home runs, batting averages, RBIs, and World Series rings, we schoolyard scientists would set about to settle nothing at all. The debate would be put aside to rage another day, maybe to invoke clutch performance or character.
Baseball writers of that day were no better than large schoolboys, and they hated Bill James. But the “gee whiz” school of baseball writing, while not yet extinct, is on the way out. James has pointed out that the emperor’s new clothes were no more than a lie agreed upon. Gradually the insiders moved out and were replaced by analytics squads and field managers who would no longer bunt in midgame nor demand that their starting pitchers be there at the end.
As a thinker and as a writer, James was often termed stubborn — by his book editors, by the baseball press, by general managers, by player agents. But stubborn is a good thing for a first-rater to be. Insiders dismissed James and “sabermetrics,” the term he coined to honor the approach of members of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR): that is, to present new evidence from original source material rather than simply shuffling the existing info to make one’s point.
John Henry, the investment manager and Red Sox owner who hired James, knew that “all investment decisions should be based on what can be measured rather than what might be predicted or felt.” This was the essence of the philosophy that James pioneered and Billy Beane implemented with the Oakland Athletics: that victory is the product of runs, so while you can’t replace star players you can replace their run contribution, and thus their wins.
This management philosophy Michael Lewis termed Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Gam. Its application has ranged far beyond our game, to how data analysis can overcome inherent advantage.
Runs Created, the Pythagorean Theorem, Minor League Equivalents, Win Shares — all the Jamesian innovations boil down to the basic structure of baseball as it was recorded in the primal box scores: only outs and runs. Conserve the former, prevail in the latter.
Henry Chadwick understood that, even as he added complex detail to the box score and proceeded to shape the game. He is the only writer inducted to the Baseball Hall of Fame, back in 1938. Bill James should be the second.
PIONEERS, Season Two: Bill James was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.