Bill James for the Baseball HOF

Homar

New Member
Aug 9, 2010
94
I want it, too.  
 
Bill James did more to enhance my understanding of baseball than any human being.  His abstracts, while in retrospect obviously tentative first steps toward an analytic understanding of the game, were amazing to me, and I read them with great anticipation.  James was the first to suggest that you didn't need to be a grizzled old scout with wrinkled skin and 40 years in the game in order to understand how baseball games were won or lost.  The things I learned first from him are still foundational to me: that getting on base, not making outs, is the key to offensive performance; that understanding the parks in which the game is played is crucial to team formation; that ball players peak between 25-27, and not at 31 or 32 as Curt Gowdy and Tony Kubek were always trying to tell me; that there were such things as "peripherals" like strikeouts and walks per nine that told you much more about pitching performance than the won-loss record; that OBP and Slugging percentage were really crucial, much more so than the vaunted batting average, and on and on and on. 
 
I had no one else to teach me this.  There was no SOSH in 1984, but there was the Bill James abstract.  The foundations to today's player evaluation, it seems to me, flow directly from the work of Bill James.  
 
And the writing!  What a talented writer he was!  It always amuses me when a hack like the CHB mocks Bill James.  No only does Bill James know more about baseball than CHB will ever know, he was a far better writer than CHB can ever aspire to be.  
 
It won't happen.  The HOF won't recognize Marvin Miller, what chance is there for Bill James?  But every team in MLB makes decisions today in ways that are either based upon or protests against Bill James.  And if that's not a Hall of Famer, then, as he once said of, I think, Dick Allen, then I'm a lug nut.  
 

Kliq

Member
SoSH Member
Mar 31, 2013
22,667
I second his ability as a writer. In his massive abstract he wrote about a pitcher in the 1950s who wrote a brutally honest memoir of his career as a big league pitcher. I don't remember the guys name but he wrote "He (the pitcher) does not come off as a very likeable person, but the book itself is likeable because of its honesty. He had a hard fastball and an 8th grade education, and he did the best he could with each of them." One of my favorite lines in sportswriting.
 

JGray38

Member
SoSH Member
Oct 31, 2003
3,044
Rockport, MA
The "new" abstract- hard to believe it's almost 15 years old now has a lot of great writing in it. His description of Don Mossi and how he was so ugly you didn't chew the gum if he was in your pack of baseball cards is outstanding.
 

bankshot1

Member
SoSH Member
Feb 12, 2003
24,651
where I was last at
I think it was '88 or '89 and I was in Barnes and Noble in Union Sq NYC and a picked up the James abstract and had a "holy shit' revelation as I thumbed through it. I made the purchase, and have been a fan ever since. IMO bringing a new way to enjoy and understand the game should get him the eternal ticket to Cooperstown
 

URI

stands for life, liberty and the uturian way of li
Moderator
SoSH Member
Aug 18, 2001
10,329
I love Bill James, and I think he's extremely important both in baseball writing, and understanding analytics.
 
A Hall of Fame without Bill James is incomplete.  A Hall of Fame without Marvin Miller is not to be taken seriously.
 

bob burda

Member
SoSH Member
Jul 15, 2005
1,549
URI said:
I love Bill James, and I think he's extremely important both in baseball writing, and understanding analytics.
 
A Hall of Fame without Bill James is incomplete.  A Hall of Fame without Marvin Miller is not to be taken seriously.
Ten years from now, your first sentence might be redundant, and your second sentence might need to include James to go along with Miller. Miller maybe transcends baseball, since I think many or most of the player/mgt relations issues in all the major sports are derived from Miller's work with MLBPA.   Twenty years from now, if analytics becomes as heavily used in all major sports as it is in baseball, then James becomes like Miller, and a colossus in the world of sport.
 
As for just baseball, Bill James' approach, and the writing that made it both accessible and entertaining as hell, has changed the entire shape of the game and the way everyone sees the game (not necessarily in that order). There were others who came before James, but I don't think he was following their lead, and James is the one responsible for popularizing the concepts.
 
There has been a progression from when all of baseball was dumb except for outliers like Branch Rickey and later Earl Weaver, then there were a few smart organizations using analytics, then a gradually decreasing division between those that did and those that didn't, and then to today; where analytics has become a crucial element almost everywhere and the "dumb" organizations are like the Red Sox, whose analytics seem to get them to the wrong solutions.  The difference is that practically everybody is trying to be "smart/analytical" now. In baseball, James' widespread influence and the rise of analytics was next big game changer after Rickey/Robinson broke the color line and Marvin Miller revolutionized the players' market. How do you keep him out?