Bill James, the Sabermetrician
BILL JAMES, born in 1949 and raised in the small town of Mayetta, Kansas, has had more to do with changing the way people understand baseball than any other single person in history. Concepts like runs created, range factor, win shares and secondary average, which are commonplace in baseball today, would likely not exist but for Bill James. And his books and articles often make powerful observations which go well beyond baseball, helping us to make sense of the world in general. He’s also funny.
Bill James believes it’s good for children to grow up in small towns. Mayetta had only about 300 people in it, and Bill knew most of them. When anyone in the family got sick, a local doctor made house calls. Bill never knew his mother, who died when Bill was just a few years old. But he loved and admired his father, George James. Bill was very close to his older sister, Nell; they did everything together.
Bill was a large, rather uncoordinated boy but his size meant that people left him alone. He decided at an early age to speak his mind and damn the consequences. He noticed that critics of the status quo have more freedom if they’re witty. He read a lot and spent a lot of time in his own head. He didn’t need many companions outside the family, and neither his father nor anyone in Mayetta tried to make him conform. Bill loves Mayetta and hates the cliché that small towns are stultifying but he once said “I grew up sort in the middle of nowhere… obsessing endlessly about the nature of a world that lay outside my reach and experience, a little bit as if the universe was an unsolved crime and each newspaper was a clue.” He pored over advice columns, comic strips, police blotters — and baseball box scores.
The local Major League team was the Kansas City Athletics. Bill loved the A’s, and especially Catfish Hunter. He couldn’t understand why the team so rarely won; the announcers kept saying they were full of talent. The announcers, in their resonant baritones, also said that ballplayers peaked in their early 30’s, that stolen bases were very important and came when pitchers didn’t hold runners on base properly; that baseball was 75% pitching, that you could judge a pitcher by his won-loss record and a batter by his batting average; and that park attendance depended on the quality of the starting pitcher. At eight years old, Bill drank all this in, and assumed it was true.
When it was time for college, he went to the University of Kansas where he double-majored in English and Economics. He noticed that no one else did that; and that people from the English Department often made snide remarks about “econ geeks” and econ majors looked down on the English Department. It puzzled and depressed him that intelligent, educated people were so happy and comfortable with their biases.
Bill James served in the Army from December 1971 to October 1973. It’s painful to think of such a distinctive and unconventional man in the Army. I picture him with poor posture, his shirt-tail untucked, a guy who couldn’t sit down and shut up and obey his commanding officer. He later said he kept thinking he was going to be the last person killed in the Vietnam War, and that, as he was dying, Henry Kissinger would come running over, boasting that he’d just negotiated the end of the war.
His army service ended, Bill felt a little lost. He was no longer close to his sister Nell. She had married badly, then become a devout Christian and was running a homeless shelter. When she and Bill got together, they had trouble keeping up a conversation. About 1974, Bill decided to abandon academia, give up trying to be respectable on other people’s terms and instead to think about, and write about, baseball. He was struck by the contrast between how completely the action on the field was recorded — and how casual was the thinking about WHY these things happened.
Instead of being an academic scientist he would be a… baseball scientist. Instead of interviewing players or managers to understand the game, he would examine baseball as a scientist would. He would take the game of baseball apart, look at its interior machinery, and try to figure out why good players were good, which players were better than which other players, and how would you know that for sure?
He had joined the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), an organization founded to foster research about, and interest in, baseball; in tribute to SABR, Bill James called his scientific study of baseball “sabermetrics”. In the process he hoped to satisfy himself that he knew why the Kansas City A’s of his childhood had been so bad. But he wanted to go far beyond that.
This was a lonely decision; other young men his age had started to settle down and have careers and families, following baseball casually. Bill had only a vague idea of what he was trying to do, and there was no proven market for it, either among baseball management, or in the sports media. And even if such interest developed, Bill knew he didn’t have the people skills to get hired by such people, nor did he really want to be.
He plunged ahead anyway. To pay the rent, James got a job in Lawrence, Kansas watching the furnaces at the Stokely-Van Camp Pork and Beans Cannery. Fortunately, the furnaces didn’t need much watching, leaving Bill James free to think, and write up his thoughts. What the patent office in Bern, Switzerland in 1905 was to Albert Einstein and to historians of science, the Stokely-Van Camp Pork and Beans Cannery in Lawrence is to Bill James and sabermetricians. It’s the place where their greatest hero, in total obscurity, revolutionized his field.
The traditional way that baseball men and baseball writers had sorted the fastest runners from the rest was to ask other baseball men: who was the fastest guy you ever saw? That’s not a bad way to proceed; baseball people have good memories, and blazing speed is something you tend to recall. But it’s not the best way to proceed. The man being interviewed has only seen a fraction of the fast runners in baseball history; and some he may have seen near the end of their careers, when they’d slowed down. He will tend to overrate the speed of former teammates, and to underrate the speed of those he disliked.
Bill James asked instead: ‘What evidence would a fast runner leave in the statistics?’ Bunted base hits; stolen bases; a low percentage of ‘caught stealing’; triples; total defensive chances. James pointed out that the fastest outfielders tend to play centerfield, and even when they don’t start in center, they tend to sub in centerfield when the regular is hurt.
And Bill would write little articles on baseball, based on logical deduction and statistical analysis. In 1975 and 1976, when he sent off his first little pieces about baseball to sports magazines, like Sport or Sports Illustrated, these magazines didn’t publish them. They weren’t set up to publish unsolicited manuscripts from obscure freelancers. But a few obscure publications did publish Bill James articles — Baseball Digest, and Baseball Bulletin.
Having always loved to watch runners steal bases, James wanted to write an article about how valuable base stealing is. But the data said something quite different: trying to steal bases hurts a team unless the runner makes it safely two-thirds of the time.
Being a published journalist — even a terribly obscure one — gave Bill James the courage to ask the Royals for a press pass. James later recalled: “The guys in the press box did their best to make me feel I didn’t belong there.” He never felt he saw things the same way as other baseball writers. The writers used to grumble about how surly the Royals players were but Bill never forgot asking star shortstop Fred Patek for a minute, and Patek gave him 45 minutes. The other writers used tiny statistical samples to argue that a certain player was a good or bad clutch hitter; Bill considered that hopelessly unscientific.
But when, with great effort and lots of data, he produced scientific methods for analyzing baseball games, even Baseball Digest and Baseball Bulletin didn’t want to publish them. The editors of those journals were in the hinterlands of journalism — but they were still journalists. They didn’t want articles which their readers would have to study to understand. They wanted to entertain their readers, not teach them science. They told Bill James that people weren’t interested in baseball science.
But Bill has always been stubborn, and he didn’t believe that “people weren’t interested” in what he was doing. He’d go to a wedding, and a guy would come over and say ‘I hear you study baseball statistics’ and Bill would explain what he was learning, and the other guy seemed quite interested. People on the bus in Lawrence, Kansas were interested. Fellow employees at the Stokely-Van Camp Pork and Beans Cannery were interested. So in 1977 he decided to self-publish his articles, and write an annual book, The Bill James Baseball Abstract. The first one was 68 pages, mimeographed. They grew longer, and more professionally produced each year. Near his deadline, James worked almost around the clock.
In 1978, Bill married Susan McCarthy, and in time they had three kids: Rachel, Isaac and Reuben. Bill has written about Susie and his children in his baseball books, comparing his son Isaac to Catfish Hunter, because Isaac sits down and does his homework without being asked, and doesn’t make anything harder than it has to be. Susan is a graphic artist and, like her husband independent, stubborn and smart. She was not much of a baseball fan before meeting Bill. Now, she likes baseball, and scores games on a scorecard as she watches. She encouraged Bill in those early days but there was no sign that Major League Baseball management were paying attention to Bill and his work. He was surprised by how little those running baseball cared about what he said.
In his thinking, Bill James is very organized, very meticulous, and likes to find systems and families and carve up the data and put players in categories. But his office was something of a shambles. He was systematic and very powerful in attacking issues about how baseball works, and by 1982 he had enough readers to attract a major publisher but he also lost a little control of the book; Susie compared it to sending a child to school. “They see your child in a different way than you do.”
James pointed out that if baseball games were won or lost on the basis of which team had the higher percentage of base hits, then batting average would be a great stat. But since baseball games are decided on the basis of which team scores the most runs, then on base percentage (which includes walks) is more important than batting average.
Similarly, if fielding prowess could be well measured simply as a player’s ability to avoid being charged with an error, then “fielding average” would be a great stat. But since fielding prowess is the ability to prevent the other team from scoring runs, then the range of the fielder is very important. So Bill created the stat “range factor.”
He’s very good at taking a big, general idea (“Baseball is 75% pitching) and breaking it down into a lot of specific questions. (“If baseball is really 75% pitching then you would expect that…”)
The 1981 book sold well and in 1982, Ballantine Books began publishing The Baseball Abstract, and Bill James was able to quit working in pork and beans factories, and do this full-time. In 1982 and ’83, to his great pleasure, all sorts of people began contacting Bill James, and giving him credit for being right. Editors of major magazines asked Bill to write articles. He was making more money than he ever had in his life, and he and Susie splurged on some things they’d never thought they could afford.
But in 1984 and 1985, Bill James was miserable. The time alone in his head that he’d always loved and needed was gone. The phone was ringing all the time, people asking him for things, and he found it very hard to say “No.” He got letters which deserved a careful response and he felt he had no time to respond.
He told journalists some of the things he was researching, then saw garbled versions appear in the media about his half-executed projects. He hated himself for getting involved in too many different kinds of things, lending his name to sabermetric organizations which did things, or used methods, which offended him. He used food for consolation, put on a lot of weight, and hated himself for that, too. (Once he was asked “How do you handle writer’s block? He replied: “I eat.”)
By 1986, he’d learned better how to deal with being a public figure, how to say no, what to let go. When people asked him what he was researching, he might say: “I don’t want to talk about the sauce while it’s still in the skillet.” When people relayed to him praise or criticism made of him and his work, James would reply that it’s unhealthy to base your self-image on what others say about you.
In his baseball books, he began including more essays and less science, and the world found out that Bill James is a wonderful writer, too — loose and funny and right, though at times a little cruel. For instance, in 1979, when the Yankees star catcher Thurman Munson died by crashing his private plane, the Yankees acquired Rick Cerone to replace Munson. Asked how good Cerone was, Bill replied “Cerone is to catching more or less what Munson was to aviation.”
Of the 1986 Atlanta Braves, he wrote: “Lord, what an awful team. Awash in mediocrity from the top of the organization to the lowest utility infielder, the Atlanta Braves trudged blindly through another disappointing summer…”
He wrote: “Dan Ford plays the outfield like a blind man staying overnight in a friend’s apartment.”
He wrote tart essays explaining why Hall of Famers like Jesse Haines and Tommy McCarthy did not deserve to be there, and family, friends, and former teammates of those he named did not like those articles. The larger and broader the audience, the more pressure James felt to avoid being mean. He found he was writing more, but he worried that his writing had lost some of its edge.
In the old days in baseball, you had a bunch of scouts watching a prospect throw from the mound, or hit at the plate. The scouts smoked. They teased each other, traded theories and savored hunches. They had a million little things they watched for, like poise, and the pitcher’s ability to throw breaking balls for strikes when behind in the count. They merely estimated the speed of the pitcher’s fastball; that wasn’t so important.
Then a new generation came along carrying radar guns. They didn’t have to guess how hard the kid pitcher was throwing. They knew; the gun told them. They didn’t have to watch as carefully; they believed that you draft tall, hard-throwing pitchers, with long arms and long fingers. Draft a raw kid, 6'6" with a live arm, and let his minor league pitching coach teach him the pro game.
Reluctantly, the old-time scouts began using the radar guns, but they still cherished the idea that they knew who the good players were, that their eyes told them something more subtle and beautiful than what some punk could get with a radar gun.
And they often advised pitchers how to extend their careers: ‘Don’t try to strike everyone out; let the fielders do some work.’
Bill James arrived in baseball as this dispute between old-fashioned and new-fangled scouting was simmering, and he announced — and showed evidence to back up his assertion — that Major League teams didn’t know who their own best players were. A lot of scouts, and GM’s who’d spent their life in the game didn’t want to hear this from some fat geek with a beard who spent half the night studying box scores. Has Bill James ever played the game? people in baseball would ask, as a way to disqualify what he was saying.
Bill basically replied: Have you done nothing BUT play the game? The stats clearly show that being able to strike batters out, and more precisely a pitcher’s strikeout-to-walk ratio, is the best indicator of which pitchers will sustain their excellence over time.
Bill points out that baseball scouts will always be needed, to tell teams how much various prospects will improve, how high their ceiling is. He says what sabermetricians can tell teams is what kind of skills and traits are most and least useful in a player. When scouts stick to evaluating the players, and refrain from trumpeting faulty analysis of what makes winning baseball, Bill will be a happier man.
As Bill drew attention, both from people inside baseball, and from the media, he was often called “the guru of baseball statistics.” This annoyed him because he feels a guru is someone who cultivates a following by exploiting people’s naive sense of wonder and love of the exotic. He tries to do just the opposite, to rationally explain baseball science, making strange concepts familiar. He also has no fetish for statistics. Do we call a gifted, devoted economist “a guru of economic statistics”? If not, then why call a gifted and devoted sabermetrician a “guru of baseball statistics”? He just felt that it was crazy to have such detailed record-keeping built right into the DNA of the game without thinking very, very carefully about what those records showed, about what the data is telling us.
Some people quickly grasped what Bill James was doing, and loved it. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of other fans began dabbling in sabermetric enterprises of their own. James was proud of having inspired a whole movement; but he was annoyed with people who tried to make ultimate ratings, showing which player was marginally better than another one. He went so far as to write in 1984 that “The idea of rating ballplayers is an arrogant bit of nonsense” which could lead to “intellectual bankruptcy.”
James introduced runs created as a way to measure a player’s offensive value. He showed that if you take a player’s hits + walks and multiply that by his total bases; and then divide all that by his at bats + walks, you get a number which shows, with accuracy, how many runs that player creates. He invented Pythagorean winning percentage, showing that a team’s wins can be predicted by its runs scored and runs allowed totals. If a team scores 897 runs in a season and allows 697 runs , they should win 897 squared, divided by 897 squared + 697 squared, games, or about 62% of their games.
For many people, these and other concepts that Bill James invented were intellectually exciting. But baseball has always had an anti-intellectual culture, and as sabermetric concepts began to shape the playing of the game, many baseball people attacked sabermetrics; they felt their beloved sport was under assault from computers and number-crunching stat freaks who didn’t know how the peanuts tasted, and how the grass smelled, and how to motivate and discipline players; and what a grind the season was for players and coaches and the manager — didn’t know a million things which only Major League veterans could know.
Sparky Anderson, the Hall of Fame manager for the Cincinnati Reds and Detroit Tigers, once called Bill James “a little fat guy with a beard who knows nothing about nothing.” James replied, “Actually, I’m seven inches taller than Sparky is, but what the heck, three out of four ain’t bad, and it sure beats being described as ‘the guru of baseball statistics.’”
Another interesting Bill James idea is that people tend to assume that when contentious questions are settled in a democracy, that you end up with a compromise. But James argues that history doesn’t coalesce around compromise positions. Whether it’s slavery, gay marriage, or what have you, it chooses an “extreme” position.
So he believes it will be with steroid cheaters and the Hall of Fame. The numbers they put in the books will remain, and steroids will become socially useful in more and more ways, and the people emotionally invested in them as evil will age and then die off, and between the two extreme positions (“No steroid users in the Hall of Fame, period” and “Steroid use doesn’t matter”) over time it’s going to be “Steroid use doesn’t matter.” He feels if any compromise position is going to win the day, it will have to be carefully drafted and skillfully sold to the public.
Sandy Alderson and Billy Beane, GM of the Oakland Athletics, embraced some of the truths of sabermetrics, and had success. The 2006 Oakland Athletics, with just the 24th largest payroll in baseball, and not a single .300 hitter, won 93 games, with six players who had on-base percentages of .350 or better. Billy Beane’s protege, J.P. Ricciardi, was hired by the Toronto Blue Jays.
Theo Epstein GM of the Boston Red Sox, was another baseball man who believed in sabermetrics. And in 2002, the Boston Red Sox hired Bill James as “Senior Baseball Operations Advisor” and brought him to Boston.
Susan was glad to move to Boston; she finds change healthy for an artist and enrolled in a Master’s program in Art History from Boston University. When Bill was hired by the Red Sox, it was the first time he’d had an employer since he stopped watching the furnaces at that pork-and-beans plant in Lawrence, Kansas.
WHAT he advised the Red Sox is hard to know because neither side would reveal it. But he had the pleasure of knowing that he was helping, in a small way, to run a Major League baseball team, along lines which were sabermetrically sound. And the Red Sox, who had famously never won a World Series since selling Babe Ruth to the Yankees, won the World Series in 2004, 2007, 2013 and 2018.
Bill says now that ‘I’m astonished now how MUCH people react to what I write, rather than how little.” He also says: “We haven’t figured out anything yet. In a hundred years, we won’t have begun to figure baseball out.”