BOOK OF THE WEEK Losing His Stuff The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract by Bill James Free Press, 998 pp., $45 There was a time I was sure the greatest pieces of American prose were the letters of Adams and Jefferson, “Bartleby the Scrivener,” “Death Comes for the Archbishop,” and “The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract.” Who was the writer who used to type out a copy of “The Great Gatsby” every year, just to see what it would feel like to have prose that good? Bill James excited that kind of admiration. He was a statistician capable of writing that he had used the formula {(H + W – CS) x [TB + (.55 x SB)]} / (AB + W) to show that Yogi Berra, not Bill Dickey, was the greatest catcher in Yankee history. And then he would add, almost incidentally, “Yogi was always kind of a funny-looking guy; he looked like if he was a piece of furniture you’d sand him off some.” Back in the 1970s, while working as a night watchman, James began photocopying for friends the statistical analyses he’d been performing on current players. Publication of an annual “Baseball Abstract” followed, praised by writers as diverse as George Will and Norman Mailer. The “Historical Baseball Abstract,” comparing players across the history of the game, came out in 1982 and was expanded and revised for the paperback edition in 1988. Maybe it was the times that made the book seem so good. Baseball writing was a mystic’s game in those days. Roger Kahn’s “The Boys of Summer” was a beautiful book. Roger Angell’s “Late Innings” contained gorgeous essays. But both were evocative–and their imitators, in baseball book after baseball book, couldn’t be trusted to pen a sentence without reference to this noble game played on the hard diamond of experience, the rosy dawn of spring training, and the sad, purple twilight of a player’s career. And then along came Bill James to insist that baseball is a game of knowledge, not mystical emotion. Incomplete knowledge, admittedly, subject to chance and imprecision, but still about real things: how often a player gets on base and whether a pitcher throws for speed or control. James was a sort of Aristotelian madman who had narrowed himself to baseball. He knew what could be known, if only we did the math, and he knew what couldn’t be known. The result was a kind of stern reasoning baseball had lacked for years. Rube Waddell “would have been as great a pitcher as Walter Johnson if only he had had the sense God gave a rabbit.” Pete Rose was “the least-gifted great player ever.” The essays on Shoeless Joe Jackson, Mickey Rivers, and Don Drysdale were classics of knowledge in service of judgment. The article on Hal Chase was as fine an examination of human character as ever insisted it was only about baseball. That Hal Chase article is reproduced in “The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract,” the first revision in 15 years. Unfortunately, it’s one of the few old bits to make the new edition. James can still hit the outside corner from time to time, but his fastball has lost its zip, and the new “Historical Abstract” just isn’t as interesting as the old. Why does he let Pete Rose off so lightly? Why is Joe Jackson suddenly reprieved? Where’s the demand that we remember Stan Musial? James still has smart things to say. His take on “garbage statistics” (wild pitches, balks, hit-batsmen, and errors) is fascinating. His suspicions about the 1990s game are dead on. He was always slightly crazed about Joe Morgan and Mike Schmidt, so maybe he should be cut a little slack for thinking Craig Biggio the best player today. But there’s too much else wrong with the book. Instead of the hundred greatest players in the first edition, James now takes up the hundred greatest at each position. And so, to keep the text down to 998 pages while adding comments on players since 1988, all the incidental comments have been cut. It was, however, the incidental comments that made it all so fun. Add in James’s new propensity for profanity, his apparent forgetting of the difference between “less” and “fewer,” and the lack of explanation for his new rating system of “Win Shares,” and you have a book that’s like Willie Mays coming out for one last season with the Mets: The fans are glad to see him walk to the plate and sad to see him swing. –J. Bottum
