James went on to explain that the concept of an error, like many baseball concepts, was tailored to an earlier, very different game. Errors had been invented in the late 1850s, when fielders didn’t wear gloves, the outfield went unmowed and the infield ungroomed, and the ball was bashed around until it was lopsided. In 1860, a simple pop fly was an adventure. Any ball hit more than a few feet from a fielder on leave from the Civil War was unplayable. Under those circumstances, James conceded, it might have made some kind of sense to judge a fielder by his ability to cope with balls hit right at him. But a century later the statistic was still being used, unaided by any other, when anyone with eyes could see that balls hit at big league players were a trivial detail in a bigger picture. A talent for avoiding obvious failure was no great trait in a big league baseball player; the easiest way not to make an error was to be too slow to reach the ball in the first place. After all, wrote James, “you have to do something right to get an error; even if the ball is hit right at you, then you were standing in the right place to begin with.”
The statistics were not merely inadequate; they lied. And the lies they told led the people who ran major league baseball teams to misjudge their players, and mismanage their games. James later reduced his complaint to a sentence: fielding statistics made sense only as numbers, not as language. Language, not numbers, is what interested him. Words, and the meaning they were designed to convey. “When the numbers acquire the significance of language,” he later wrote, “they acquire the power to do all of the things which language can do: to become fiction and drama and poetry. …And it is not just baseball that these numbers, through a fractured mirror, describe. It is character. It is psychology, it is history, it is power, it is grace, glory, consistency, sacrifice, courage, it is success and failure, it is frustration and bad luck, it is ambition, it is overreaching, it is discipline. And it is victory and defeat, which is all that the idiot sub-conscious really understands.” What to most people was a dull record of ephemeral events without deep meaning or lasting value was for James a safe deposit box containing life’s secrets.
Baseball was theatre. But it could not be artful unless its performances could be properly understood. The meaning of these performances depended on the clarity of the statistics that measured them; bad fielding statistics were like a fog hanging over the stage. That raised an obvious question: why would the people in charge allow professional baseball to be distorted so obviously? The answer was equally obvious: they believed they could judge a player’s performance simply by watching it. In this, James argued, they were deeply mistaken.
That was James’s most general point, buried beneath his outrage about fielding statistics: the naked eye was an inadequate tool for learning what you needed to know to evaluate baseball players and baseball games:
Think about it. One absolutely cannot tell, by watching, the difference between a .300 hitter and a .275 hitter. The difference is one hit every two weeks. It might be that a reporter, seeing every game that the team plays, could sense that difference over the course of the year if no records were kept, but I doubt it. Certainly the average fan, seeing perhaps a tenth of the team’s games, could never gauge two performances that accurately—in fact if you see both 15 games a year, there is a 40% chance that the .275 hitter will have more hits than the .300 hitter in the games that you see. The difference between a good hitter and an average hitter is simply not visible—it is a matter of record.
But the hitter is the center of attention. We notice what he does, bend over the scorecard with his name in mind. If he hits a smash down the third base line and the third baseman makes a diving stop and throws the runner out, then we notice and applaud the third baseman. But until the smash is hit, who is watching the third baseman? If he anticipates, if he adjusts for the hitter and moves over just two steps, then the same smash is a routine backhand stop—and nobody applauds….
It was James’s first sustained attack on baseball’s conventional wisdom. He concluded it with a question:
So if we can’t tell who the good fielders are accurately from the record books, and we can’t tell accurately from watching, how can we tell?
“By counting things,” he replied. Then he went on to propose a new statistic—the “range factor,” he called it. A player’s range factor was simply the number of successful plays he made in the field per game. There were obvious problems with range factors, too—an outfielder on a team staffed by fly ball pitchers, for instance, had more opportunities to make successful plays than an outfielder on a team staffed by sinker ball pitchers—but the details of the thing didn’t matter. What mattered was James’s ability to light a torch in a dark chamber and throw a new light on a dusty problem. He made you think. There was something bracing about the way he did it—his passion, his humor, his intolerance of stupidity, his preference for leaving an honest mess for others to clean up rather than a tidy lie for them to admire—that inspired others to join his cause. The cause was bigger than fielding statistics. The cause was the systematic search for new baseball knowledge.
The cause wasn’t original. James was hardly the first person to notice that there was still stuff to be figured out about baseball, and that the game’s underlying rationalities might be discerned through statistical analysis. Going right back to the invention of the box score in 1845, and its subsequent improvement in 1859 by a British-born journalist named Henry Chadwick, there had been numerate analysts who saw that baseball, more than other sports, gave you meaningful things to count, and that by counting them you could determine the value of the people who played the game. But what got counted was often simply what was easiest to count, or what Henry Chadwick, whose reference point was cricket, had decided was important to count.
Chadwick was the critical figure in this history. To anyone who asked, “How could baseball statistics be so screwed up?,” Henry Chadwick was usually the beginning, and occasionally the end, of the answer. Chadwick’s stated goal in counting the events that occurred on a ball field was reform: he wanted players to be judged by their precise contributions to victory and defeat. He was as upset about the immorality he witnessed on the baseball diamond as he was about the drinking and gambling he found on the city streets—about which he also never tired of complaining. He longed to affix blame and credit for baseball plays, and to do it, he grossly oversimplified matters. Fielding errors were just one example of Chadwick’s moralistic mind at work. Another was his interpretation of the base on balls. In cricket there was no such thing as a walk: Chadwick had to get his mind around a new idea. The tool was ill-designed for the task: Chadwick was better at popularizing baseball statistics than he was at thinking through their meaning. He decided that walks were caused entirely by the pitcher—that the hitter had nothing to do with them. In his initial box score Chadwick recorded a walk as an error; even in the later box scores, after he had listened to, or at least heard, the obvious objections from others, Chadwick never credited the hitter. He simply removed the walk altogether from the record books. “There is but one true criterion of skill at the bat,” he wrote, “and that is the number of times bases are made on clean hits.” Enter the batting average, ever since the chief measure of a player’s offensive value.*
For a fuller, more respectable account of the history of the box score, see Jules Tygiel’s Past Time: Baseball As History (2000).
The more you examined these old measurement devices, the less apt they seemed. Chadwick, with help from others, had created a system of perverse incentives for anyone who trotted out onto a baseball field. The fetish made of “runs batted in” was another good example of the general madness. RBI had come to be treated by baseball people as an individual achievement—free agents were paid for their reputation as RBI machines when clearly they were not. Big league players routinely swung at pitches they shouldn’t to lard their RBI count. Why did they get so much credit for this? To knock runners in, runners needed to be on base when you came to bat. There was
a huge element of luck in even having the opportunity, and what wasn’t luck was, partly, the achievement of others. “The problem,” wrote James, “is that baseball statistics are not pure accomplishments of men against other men, which is what we are in the habit of seeing them as. They are accomplishments of men in combination with their circumstances.”
The failure of baseball people to acknowledge that fact in their statistics led to exactly the sort of moral corruption Henry Chadwick, in creating them, had sought to eliminate. The many little injustices and misunderstandings embedded in the game’s records spawned exotic inefficiencies. Baseball strategies were often wrongheaded and baseball players were systematically misunderstood. Chadwick succeeded in creating a central role for statistics in baseball, but in doing it he created the greatest accounting scandal in professional sports.
Between Chadwick and James there had been fitful efforts to rethink old prejudices. The legendary GM Branch Rickey employed a professional statistician named Allan Roth who helped to compose an article under Rickey’s byline in Life magazine in 1954 that argued for the importance of on-base and slugging percentages over batting average. A professor of mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins, Earnshaw Cook, wrote two pompous books, in prose crafted to alienate converts, that argued for the relevance of statistical analysis in baseball. In the early 1960s, a pair of brothers employed by IBM used the company’s computers to analyze baseball strategies and players. But the desire to use statistics to make baseball efficient—to measure and value precisely the events that occur on a baseball field, to give the numbers new powers of language—only became potent when it became practical.
When Bill James published his 1977 Baseball Abstract, two changes were about to occur that would make his questions not only more answerable but also more valuable. First came radical advances in computer technology: this dramatically reduced the cost of compiling and analyzing vast amounts of baseball data. Then came the boom in baseball players’ salaries: this dramatically raised the benefits of having such knowledge. “If we’re going to pay these guys $150,000 a year to do this,” James concluded in his essay on fielding, “we should at least know how good they are—which means knowing how much they allowed in the field just as much as it means knowing how much they created at bat.” If this sounded compelling when baseball players were paid $150,000 a year, it sounded one hundred times more so when they were paid $15 million a year.
James’s first proper essay was the preview to an astonishing literary career. There was but one question he left unasked, and it vibrated between his lines: if gross miscalculations of a person’s value could occur on a baseball field, before a live audience of thirty thousand, and a television audience of millions more, what did that say about the measurement of performance in other lines of work? If professional baseball players could be over- or undervalued, who couldn’t? Bad as they may have been, the statistics used to evaluate baseball players were probably far more accurate than anything used to measure the value of people who didn’t play baseball for a living.
Still, had he left off writing in 1977, James would have been dismissed as just another crank who didn’t know when to shut up about box scores. He didn’t leave off in 1977. It didn’t occur to him to be disappointed by a sale of seventy-five copies; he was encouraged! No author has ever been so energized by so little. As James’s wife, Susan McCarthy, later put it, “instead of one page of a stolen base study lying on top of a couple of pages of pitcher data in the dungeon of a Stokely Van Camp’s cardboard box for years and years, ideas and questions about issues he had been chewing on for a long time took up residence in a climate that allowed for growth and maturation.”*
An invisible subplot of baseball fanaticism is its effect on the spouses of the fanatics. “Bill hid his interest in baseball when we first started dating,” said his wife. “If I had known the extent of it, I’m not sure we’d have gotten very far.”
In 1978, James came out with a second book, and this time, before entering his discussion, he checked his modesty at the door. The book was titled 1978 Baseball Abstract: The 2nd Annual Edition of Baseball’s Most Informative and Imaginative Review. “I would like to produce here the most complete, detailed, and comprehensive picture of the game of baseball available anywhere,” he wrote, “and I would like to avoid repeating anything that has ever been written before.”
Word had spread this time: 250 people bought a copy. To an author who viewed a sale of 75 copies as encouragement, the sale of 250 was a bonanza. James’s pen was now an unstoppable force. Every winter for the next nine years he wrote with greater confidence; every spring his growing audience found relatively less space devoted to numbers and more to James’s words. The words might run on for many pages but they were typically presented as digressions from the numbers. Wishing to convey the history of his obsession with baseball, for instance, James buried it in a discussion of the year-end stats of the Kansas City Royals. Unable to supress his distaste for the rich men who bought baseball teams and spent huge sums of money on players, he left off writing about the Atlanta Braves and picked up the subject of their new owner. “Ted Turner,” he wrote, “seems never to have been tempted by moderation, by dignity or restraint. He is a man who plays hard at gentleman’s games and whines when he loses that the victor was not a gentleman. No matter how hard he flees, he will always be pursued by an Awful Commonness, and that is what makes him a winner.” (Yankees fans would soon learn that James was capable of greater contempt: “Turner is the man Steinbrenner dreams of being.”)
The Baseball Abstracts were one long, elaborate aside, and the aside raised all sorts of strange new questions: If Mike Schmidt hit against the Cubs all the time, what would he hit? Did fleet young black players, as it seemed to James, actually lose their speed later in their careers than fleet young white players? Who were the best dead hitters? Even the most obscure questions about baseball, and its history, had practical implications. To calculate what Mike Schmidt would hit if he hit only against the Chicago Cubs, you needed to understand how hitting in Wrigley Field differed from hitting in other parks. To compare white and black speedsters, you needed to find a way to measure speed on the base paths and in the field; and once you’d done that, you might begin to ask questions about the importance of foot speed. To determine the best dead hitters, you needed to build tools to evaluate them, and those tools worked just as well on the living.
That last problem preoccupied James. From his second season on, he more or less set baseball defense to one side and concentrated on baseball offense. He explained to the readers of the second Abstract that his book contained roughly forty thousand baseball statistics. A few of them had been easy for him to obtain, but “the bulk of them were compiled one by one, picked out of the box scores and laboriously sorted into groups of about 30 or so, groups with titles like ‘Double Plays turned in games started by Nino Espinosa,’ and ‘Triples hit by Larry Parrish in July.”’ He freely admitted that collecting baseball statistics was, on the face of it, a bizarre way to spend one’s time—unless one was obsessed by the baseball offense. “I am a mechanic with numbers,” he wrote to readers of the third Abstract,
tinkering with the records of baseball games to see how the machinery of the baseball offense works. I do not start with the numbers any more than a mechanic starts with a monkey wrench. I start with the game, with the things that I see there and the things that people say there. And I ask: Is it true? Can you validate it? Can you measure it? How does it fit with the rest of the machinery? And for those answers I go to the record books…. What is remarkable to me is that I have so little company. Baseball keeps copious records, and people talk about them and argue about them and think about them a great deal. Why doesn’t anybody use them? Why doesn’t anybody say, in the face of this contention or that one, “Prove it”?
For what now seem like obvious reasons the baseball offense was more interesting to James than the other two potentially big fields of r
esearch, fielding and pitching. Hitting statistics were abundant and had, for James, the powers of language. They were, in his Teutonic coinage, “imagenumbers.” Literary material. When you read them, they called to mind pictures. “Let us start with the number 191 in the hit column,” he wrote,
and with the assertion that it is not possible for a flake (I would hope that no one reading this book doesn’t know what a flake is) to get 191 hits in a season. It is possible for a bastard to do this. It is possible for a warthog to do this. It is possible for many people whom you would not want to marry your sister to do this. But to get 191 hits in a season demands (or seems to demand, which is as good for the drama) a consistency, a day-in, day-out devotion, a self-discipline, a willingness to play with pain and (to some degree) a predisposition to the team game which is wholly inconsistent with flakiness. It is entirely possible, on the other hand, for a flake to hit 48 homers. Hitting 48 homers is something done by large, slow men three-quarters thespian….
James was an aesthete. But he was also a pragmatist: he had happened upon something broken and wanted to fix it. But he could only fix what he had the tools to fix. The power of statistical analysis depends on sample size: the larger the pile of data the analyst has to work with, the more confidently he can draw specific conclusions about it. A right-handed hitter who has gone two for ten against left-handed pitching cannot as reliably be predicted to hit .200 against lefties as a hitter who has gone 200 for 1,000. The offensive statistics available to James in 1978 were sufficiently comprehensive to reach specific, meaningful conclusions. Offense he could fix. He couldn’t fix fielding because, as he had explained in his first Abstract, there wasn’t the data available to make a meaningful appraisal of fielding. Pitching didn’t need to be fixed. Or, at any rate, James didn’t think it did.
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