Bill James: Father of Sabermetrics
If someone could earn a Ph. D in baseball, Bill James would be that guy. Born and raised in the small town of Holton, Kansas, James from an early age had a fascination with baseball. He became an obsessive fan.
Eventually the real world would catch up to him as he went off to the University of Kansas where he would receive a Bachelor’s degree in English and economics. Upon graduating, James was sent to fight in Vietnam.
James served in Vietnam for a couple years, and when he finished he returned back to the University of Kansas to add another degree in Education. During all these life events, Bill James never lost the love for the game of baseball. After finishing his education, the die-hard fan began working as a night security guard at a pork-and-beans cannery, and this is where he began writing baseball articles.
During his night shifts, James had a lot of time to write these articles. But, they weren’t the typical baseball articles which included game recaps, or interviews with players and managers. Instead his writings included statistics and wit, answering questions like, which pitchers and catchers allow the most stolen bases? Or, how many walks and hits a pitcher gives up per inning?
James wrote many of these during his nights at the cannery, and when he sent his work into editors, most thought his ideas were coming out of left field. James then decided to do something that since has become mainstream. At 27 years old, James began self-publishing an annual book titled, “The Bill James Abstract.” The first edition featured 80 pages full of game analysis of box scores from the 1976 MLB season.
His books included a brand new idea, not introduced in baseball before. He called it, the ever-expanding line of numerical analysis, or Sabermetrics. He used “saber” to honor SABR — the Society for American Baseball Research.
So there Bill James was, sitting in a deserted pork-and-beans cannery, in search for objective knowledge about baseball. He knew he was on to something, but he began to wonder if anyone was listening or even cared.
And, they were.
By 1992, his book sales were on the rise after he received recognition and praise from Sports Illustrated. James was offered a contract with a national publisher, and the rest has been baseball history. Soon, sabermetrics became the rage and was this new, interesting phrase baseball fans were talking about. The world of baseball stats began to increase as new stats like, runs created, wins above replacement, and Pythagorean winning percentage were added. In-depth discussions about Willie Mays being faster than Mickey Mantle could all be determined through statistics.
Video games have been advancing and developing into crazy detailed games, with incredible graphics. One of the most recent and popular baseball games out right now is MLB The Show 2017. In this game you can play as some of baseball’s past legends. Since it has been decades since some of these players have been on the field though, how do these video games determine the ratings for their attributes?
They do this all with stats. Video game editors look at certain statistics like: home runs, batting average, on-base percentage, slugging percentage, stolen bases and more. By doing so they can determine past player’s power, contact, speed, and much more, compared to players of the present.
With the advent of the computer age, came the growing ease of number crunching, which contributed to even more complexity to be added to the world of baseball numbers. Bill James’ invention lead to other people writing books with their takes on sabermetrics, and eventually sabermetrics would be the foundation of how professional baseball organizations would be built.
In 2015, Bill James sat down with Tech Times for an interview.
TT: “How do sabermetrics give you a sharper insight than merely just stats?”
BJ: “Let’s take the defensive spectrum. The defensive spectrum is an organized alignment of the defensive positions with the shortstop on one end and first base on the other. The shortstops are fast, they tend to be younger, they need to have a good throwing arm. First basemen and left fielders tend to be much slower, they tend to be older, they don’t need to throw and because there’s less pressure put on them as defensive players, they’re expected to hit much more… it’s (first base) a position in which speed is less emphasized and strength is more emphasized. When you’re trying to sort out what is the relative value of speed versus power, it becomes useful to have a sense of what the defensive spectrum is and where a player is on that spectrum. It’s a useful part of the analysis.”
TT: “There are some sabermetrics that are flat-out complicated. Do you get that often?”
BJ: “ Yeah, a lot of it now is over my head, but think about what that means… Nobody hires a meteorologist because they want to know about meteorology. They want to know about the weather. In order for us to be useful, we’ve got to be the same way. We have to produce intelligible things rather than complicated things that people don’t really understand.”
TT: “Are there still teams that perhaps don’t put as much emphasis on these numbers as others?”
BJ: “Certainly there are some, yes, that emphasize that type of analysis much more than others. But even those that are most behind the curve still embrace a lot of things that are produced by sabermetrics, without realizing where they come from… The [infield/outfield] shifts come out of data analysis, they come out of our field. Even if you don’t believe in that stuff, everybody shifts right now.”
TT: “Is there any such thing as a tell-all sabermetric when it comes to pitching and batting?”
BJ: “People have been developing tell-all metrics for a long time. What I always look at is what are they missing? If there’s a tell-all metric that isn’t missing anything, then we’re done, right? They don’t need us any more. I always look at those metrics like, ‘What are we missing?’ There’s an enormous amount that’s real and central to the game, but that we can’t measure.”
What I grasp from this interview is that the idea Bill James originally started with has expanded into something that even he has trouble understanding now. The ever-expanding analysis of the game has changed the way teams evaluate and manage their teams. And like James said, there are still some teams that do not put an emphasis on numbers, but they still embrace a lot of things that are products of sabermetrics.
Bill James created a movement in the MLB that all teams have come to encompass, and that will not be slowing down anytime soon.
