It was ten years ago last month that baseball stats guru Bill James declared he was “breakin’ the wand”–ending his annual Baseball Abstract series and abdicating his growing reputation as a wizard of the sport. I apply the overused term “guru”–a label James himself decries–because in his case it is an accurate metaphor. Working from his bank of computers on high–actually in Kansas, not quite as remote as the Himalayas, but close–James served as an oracle, a priest, a man who conveyed his convictions about baseball to whoever was open to them. His Baseball Abstract, which started as a newsletter in the mid-70s and grew until James’s “retirement” in 1988, revolutionized the game, bringing terms like “ballpark differential” and “platoon advantage” and, perhaps most important of all, “on-base percentage” into the sport’s mainstream. James never abandoned baseball–he has since churned out excellent books on the Hall of Fame and the history of baseball managers–but he did abandon the form of the Abstract as too limiting. He first moved to the sprawling annual Bill James Baseball Book, then to the more practical Bill James Player Ratings Book, a series he likewise ended a few years ago.
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Since then, the sport has been lacking a well-researched, well-argued, well-written annual stats volume–in short, a dependable analysis of players and teams (though Total Baseball has done well in a more exhaustive encyclopedia format). The shortage is not of quantity but quality. Each spring, any number of books come out on baseball and its statistics. With “fantasy” and Rotisserie leagues still flourishing, it’s a boom industry. Some of this material, like the antiquated Street & Smith annual or the newer but equally conventional Bill Mazeroski magazine, recycles the usual gossip and the same tired scouting reports about “the book” on various players. The James method, by contrast, is to remove the subjective analysis of scouts and so-called baseball experts from the equation and stick to statistics as an objective and accurate measure of worth. Yet even this approach has been taken to extremes by STATS, the group James passed his broken wand to a decade ago. STATS’s annual baseball books, chock-full of raw data, are mind-numbing even to a former high-school calculus student and admitted stats hound like myself. Now, however, after a year of research, I am ready to anoint an heir apparent to the James mantle: Baseball Prospectus, a big, thick book now in its third year and for the first time receiving the support of a publisher, Brassey’s. It’s the best baseball annual since The Bill James Player Ratings Book, and it may turn out to be as invaluable as the old Abstracts.
The eyes sometimes lie, as any baseball fan knows and as most baseball experts should be willing to admit. The common phrase for a player who is deceptive in such a manner is “someone who looks good in a uniform,” someone with athleticism but no real sense for the fine points of the game. Where BP and the conventional baseball scouting report–“the book”–diverge is that BP believes there are many players who look good but actually hurt a team, players like Brian McRae and Shawon Dunston and Ozzie Guillen (to name just three familiar former Chicagoans). They may look good, they may be skilled, they may even be exuberant, but there are holes in their games that hurt a team, and they show up over time in statistics–and in runs. The main drawback with all three of those players is an inability to take a walk–that is, a low on-base percentage. Like James, BP hammers away that OBP is still not granted its proper importance in the baseball world. It seems obvious: get more men on base, score more runs. Yet much of baseball still believes the macho idea that a walk isn’t as good as a hit. USA Today and Baseball Weekly–both deeply influenced by Jamesian statistical research or Sabermetrics (derived from SABR, the stats-oriented Society for American Baseball Research)–both include OBP in their statistical tables, but neither the Cubs nor the White Sox included OBP in their 1997 media guide–for good reason, where the Cubs are concerned.
Yet James and BP share qualities that are perhaps even more important. Both James and the BP authors write well and conversationally, undercutting their authoritative data with a disarming sense of humor. Get the South Park reference in the Hal Morris item, or this remark on the weak-armed reliever Greg McMichael: “I’m pretty sure one of the changeups he threw in July just hit a catcher’s mitt somewhere.” Or there’s this on the Pirates: “A middle infield of [Tony] Womack and [Abraham] Nunez in 1998 sounds about as appealing as the ‘all-Musburger, all-the-time’ network.” BP acknowledges the limitations of statistics. Hitters tend to be relatively consistent and predictable from year to year, but pitchers are much more erratic, so projections for this year’s hurlers are labeled WFG, for “wild fucking guess.” BP marvels at the amazing things statistics can do in analyzing and even predicting performance, but it marvels more at the players who defy expectations and break through in unexpected ways. That, after all, is why they play the games on the field and not in a computer.
