In 1979, in the third, now annual, Baseball Abstract, James wrote, “a hitter should be measured by his success in that which he is trying to do, and that which he is trying to do is create runs. It is startling, when you think about it, how much confusion there is about this. I find it remarkable that, in listing offenses, the league will list first—meaning best—not the team which scored the most runs, but the team with the highest batting average. It should be obvious that the purpose of an offense is not to compile a high batting average.” Because it was not obvious, at least to the people who ran baseball, James smelled a huge opportunity. How did runs score? “We can’t directly see how many runs each player creates,” he wrote, “but we can see how many runs each team creates.”
He set out to build a model to predict how many runs a team would score, given its number of walks, hits, stolen bases, etc. He’d dig out the numbers for, say, the 1975 Red Sox. (Walks by individual players were still hard to find in 1975, thanks to Henry Chadwick, but team totals were available.) He could also find out how many runs the 1975 Red Sox scored. What he needed to determine was the relative importance to the team’s scoring of the various things Red Sox players did at the plate and on the base paths—that is, assign weights to outs, walks, steals, singles, doubles, etc. There was nothing elegant or principled in the way he went about solving the problem. He simply tried out various equations on the right side of the equals sign until he found one that gave him the team run totals on the left side. The first version of what James called his “Runs Created” formula looked like this:
Runs Created = (Hits + Walks) X Total Bases/(At Bats + Walks)
Crude as it was, the equation could fairly be described as a scientific hypothesis: a model that would predict the number of runs a team would score given its walks, steals, singles, doubles, etc. You could plug actual numbers from past seasons into the right side and see if they gave you the runs the team scored that season. James was, in a sense, trying to predict the past. If the actual number of runs scored by the 1975 Boston Red Sox differed dramatically from the predicted number, his model was clearly false. If they were identical, James was probably onto something. As it turned out, James was onto something. His model came far closer, year in and year out, to describing the run totals of every big league baseball team than anything the teams themselves had come up with.
That, in turn, implied that professional baseball people had a false view of their offenses. It implied, specifically, that they didn’t place enough value on walks and extra base hits, which featured prominently in the “Runs Created” model, and placed too much value on batting average and stolen bases, which James didn’t even bother to include. It implied that sacrifices of any sort were aptly named, as they made no contribution whatsoever. That is: outs were more precious than baseball people believed, or seemed to believe. Not all baseball people, of course. The Jamesean analysis was consistent with an approach to the game championed most vocally by the former manager of the Baltimore Orioles, Earl Weaver. Weaver designed his offenses to maximize the chances of a three-run homer. He didn’t bunt, and he had a special taste for guys who got on base and guys who hit home runs. Big ball, as opposed to small ball.
But once again, the details of James’s equation didn’t matter all that much. He was creating opportunities for scientists as much as doing science himself. Other, more technically adroit people would soon generate closer approximations of reality. What mattered was (a) it was a rational, testable hypothesis; and (b) James made it so clear and interesting that it provoked a lot of intelligent people to join the conversation. “The fact that the formulas work with the accuracy that they do is a way of saying there are essentially stable relationships between batting average, home runs, walks, other offensive elements—and runs,” wrote James.
This kind of talk was catnip to people whose lives were devoted to discovering stable relationships in a seemingly unstable world: physicists, biologists, economists. There was a young statistician at the RAND Corporation, a future chair of the Harvard statistics department, named Carl Morris. “I’d been thinking about advanced ideas in baseball analysis,” said Morris, “and was impressed that someone else was, too, who wrote about it in a very interesting way.” Morris counted the days until the next Baseball Abstract appeared. James pointed the way to big questions that Morris could address more rigorously than even James could.
There was also a bright young government economist with the Office of Management and Budget named Eddie Epstein. He stumbled across the Abstract and decided he was in the wrong line of work. “I read the Abstract,” he said, “and the light bulb went off: I can do this! The way Bill laid out very clearly what could be gleaned from these mountains of baseball data. In the past an awful lot was thought to be unknowable.” Epstein began to pester Edward Bennett Williams, the owner of the Baltimore Orioles, for a job.
Then there were the few hobbyists who had been active before James began writing his Abstracts. Dick Cramer was a research scientist for the pharmaceutical company then called SmithKline French (now GlaxoSmithKline), and so had access to a computer. By day he used the SmithKline computers to discover new drugs and by night he used them to test his own theories about baseball. For instance, Cramer had a hypothesis about clutch hitting: it didn’t exist. No matter what the announcers said, and what the coaches believed, major league baseball players did not perform particularly well—or particularly badly—in critical situations. On the one hand, it made a funny kind of sense: no one who behaved differently under pressure would ever make it to the big leagues. On the other hand, it contradicted the sacred, received wisdom in baseball. The sheer counterintuitiveness of his notion delighted Cramer. “It violates everyone’s personal experience of pressure, and how they cope with it,” he said. And yet it was true, or impossible to disprove. Cramer had tested it and found no evidence that players hit differently in one situation than any other—with a pair of exceptions. Some left-handed hitters fared worse against lefties than righties, and some right-handed hitters fared worse against righties than lefties.
Cramer’s work has subsequently withstood intense, repeated critical scrutiny, but until Bill James came along no one paid it any attention. “Until Bill came along,” Cramer says, “it was just three or four of us writing letters to each other. Even my own family would say, ‘This is a crazy way to spend your time.’”
Cramer, like James, understood that the search for baseball knowledge was constrained by the raw statistics, and began to think seriously about starting a company to collect better data about Major League Baseball games than did Major League Baseball. One of the men to whom Cramer wrote letters on the subject was Pete Palmer. Palmer worked as an engineer at Raytheon, on the software that supported the radar station in the Aleutian Islands that monitored Russian test missiles. At least that’s what he did for money; for love he sat down with his charts and slide rule and analyzed baseball strategies. Both Palmer and Cramer had separately created their own models of the baseball offense that differed trivially from James’s. (Together, they later dreamed up the stat now widely used to capture the primary importance to offense of slugging and on-base percentages: OPS, an acronym for on base plus slugging.) Palmer really was a gifted statistical mind, and he had done a lot of work, just for the hell of it, that demonstrated the foolishness of many conventional baseball strategies. Bunts, stolen bases, hit and runs—they all were mostly self-defeating and all had a common theme: fear of public humiliation.
“Managers tend to pick a strategy that is least likely to fail rather than pick a strategy that is most efficient,” said Palmer. “The pain of looking bad is worse than the gain of making the best move.” Palmer had written a book back in the 1960s revealing all this. The manuscript was still gathering dust on his desk when Bill James came along and created a market for it. In 1984, in the wake of Bill James’s success, he was able to publish it: The Hidden Game of Baseball. “Bill proved there were buyers for this kind of t
hing,” Palmer says. “I’m not sure the book would have seen the light of day otherwise.”
James’s literary powers combined with his willingness to answer his mail to create a movement. Research scientists at big companies, university professors of physics and economics and life sciences, professional statisticians, Wall Street analysts, bored lawyers, math wizards unable to hold down regular jobs—all these people were soon mailing James their ideas, criticisms, models, and questions. His readership must have been one of the strangest group of people ever assembled under one idea. Before he found a publisher, James had four readers he considered “celebrities.” They were:
Norman Mailer
Baseball writer Dan Okrent
William Goldman, the screenwriter (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid)
The guy who played “Squiggy” on the TV sitcom Laverne & Shirley
James’s readers were hard to classify because he was hard to classify. The sheer quantity of brain power that hurled itself voluntarily and quixotically into the search for new baseball knowledge was either exhilarating or depressing, depending on how you felt about baseball. The same intellectual resources might have cured the common cold, or put a man on Pluto; instead, it was used to divine the logic hidden inside a baseball game, and create whole new ways of second-guessing the manager.
Four years into his experiment James was still self-publishing his Baseball Abstract but he was overwhelmed by reader mail. What began as an internal monologue became, first, a discussion among dozens of resourceful people, and then, finally, a series of arguments in which fools were not tolerated. (Most witheringly not by James: “Is baseball really 75% pitching? James J. Skipper attempted to answer this question in the 1980 Baseball Research Journal, by the ingenious method of asking everybody in sight what percentage of baseball was pitching, totaling up their answers, and dividing by the number of people in sight….”) By 1981, in response to a pile of letters asking him what he thought about a new baseball offense model created by the sports journalist Thomas Boswell, James was able and willing to write that “the world needs another offensive rating system like Custer needed more Indians (or, for that matter, like the Indians needed another Custer)…. What we really need is for the amateurs to clear the floor.” There was now such a thing as intellectually rigorous baseball analysts. James had given the field of study its name: sabermetrics.*
The name derives from SABR, the acronym of the Society for American Baseball Research. In 2002, the society had about seven thousand members.
The swelling crowd of disciples and correspondents made James’s movement more potent in a couple of ways. One was that it now had a form of peer review: by the early 1980s all the statistical work was being vetted by people, unlike James, who had a deep interest in, and understanding of, statistical theory. Baseball studies, previously an eccentric hobby, became formalized along the lines of an academic discipline. In one way it was an even more effective instrument of progress: all these exquisitely trained, brilliantly successful scientists and mathematicians were working for love, not money. And for a certain kind of hyperkinetic analytical, usually male mind there was no greater pleasure than searching for new truths about baseball. “Baseball is a soap opera that lends itself to probabilistic thinking,” is how Dick Cramer described the pleasure.
The other advantage was that the growing army of baseball analysts was willing and able to generate new baseball data. James was forever moaning about the paucity of the information kept by major league baseball teams. Early in one of his Baseball Abstracts he had explained to his readers that “the answers that I arrive at—and thus the methods I have chosen—are never wholly satisfactory, almost never wholly disappointing. The most consistent problems that I have arise from the limitations on my information sources. All I have is the box scores.” The reason he couldn’t get more than the box scores is that the company that kept the score sheets for Major League Baseball, the Elias Sports Bureau, was perfectly unhelpful when James asked it for access to them. “The problem with the Elias Bureau,” he wrote, “is that the Elias Bureau never turns loose of a statistic unless they get a dollar for it. Their overarching concern in life is to get every dollar they can from you and give you as little as possible in return for it—like a lot of other businesses, I suppose, only with a more naked display of greed than is really usual.”
James was shocked by the indifference of baseball insiders to the fans who took more than an ordinary interest. Major League Baseball had no sense of the fans as customers, and so hadn’t the first clue of what the customer wanted. The customer wanted stats and Major League Baseball did its best not to give them to him. The people inside Major League Baseball were, if anything, hostile to the people outside Major League Baseball who wished to study the game. That struck James, who by now had perfected the art of sounding like a sane man in an insane world, as mad. “The entire basis of professional sports is the public’s interest in what is going on,” he wrote. “To deny the public access to information that it cares about is the logical equivalent of locking the stadiums and playing the games in private so that no one will find out what is happening.”
In 1984, James wrote to what was now a rapidly expanding crowd of baseball nuts and proposed a radical idea: Take the accumulation of baseball statistics out of the hands of baseball insiders. Build an organization of hundreds of volunteer scorekeepers who would collect the stuff you needed to know to reduce baseball to a science. “What I propose here, so far as I know for the first time in a century, is to start over…. I am proposing to re-build the box score, not around the old one, but around the tool from which the box score is assembled: the score sheet.” He then explained that much of the data collected by professional baseball teams—say, how right-handed hitters fared against left-handed pitching—wasn’t available to the public. Worse, baseball teams didn’t have the sense to know what to collect, and so an awful lot of critical data simply went unrecorded: how batters fared in different counts and different game situations, who was pitching when a base was stolen, how different outfielders affected the audacity of runners on the base paths, where hits landed and how hard they were hit, how many pitches a pitcher threw in a game. The lack of critical data meant that “we as analysts of the game are blocked off from the basic source of information which we need to undertake an incalculable variety of investigative studies.”
The movement to take the understanding of professional baseball away from baseball professionals, dubbed by James “Project Scoresheet,” soon combined with a small, failing business created by Dick Cramer, called STATS Inc., that was designed to do much the same thing. The goal of STATS Inc. had been, in Cramer’s words, “to set down the primary events that occurred in a baseball game as completely as possible.” Back in 1980, STATS Inc. had set out to sell this sort of information to baseball teams, but the teams wanted nothing to do with it. Cramer pressed on: to big league baseball games, beginning in the spring of 1981 with an exhibition game between the Chicago Cubs and the Oakland A’s (future A’s scout Matt Keough got the win), the company sent its own scorekeepers. Along with all the usual data, these poorly paid people recorded play-by-play information about the games that had never before been systematically collected: the pitch count at the end of at bats, pitch types and locations, the direction and distance of batted balls. They broke the field down into twenty-six wedges radiating out from home plate. A fly ball’s distance was judged to be where it landed; a ground ball’s, where it was picked up. If a player singled and advanced to second on an error by the right fielder, the play was recorded as two separate events. All of this was new and, to the movement analysts, essential if you wanted to get to the guts of the game.
The people who were paid to manage professional teams failed to see the point. They hadn’t even bothered to compile the information they needed to analyze their actions intelligently. Presented with new information by STATS Inc., they showed little interest in it, even when it was o
ffered to them gratis. The CEO of STATS Inc., John Dewan, said that “You had general managers and managers who had played the game. How could someone who all they knew is computers tell them anything that would make them more successful? I remember calling the White Sox, almost as a matter of courtesy, and telling them ‘Hey, when Frank Thomas plays first base, he hits seventy points better than when he DH’s.’ Nobody cared to know it.” Every eighteen months STATS Inc. would hire another bright, well-educated young man who simply could not believe that major league baseball teams did not want to know things that might help them win games. He would then proceed to hurl himself into the business of selling STATS Inc. to baseball teams. He always quit, disillusioned. “The people who run baseball are surrounded by people trying to give them advice,” said James. “So they’ve built very effective walls to keep out anything.”
It wasn’t as simple as the unease of jocks in the presence of nerds. Professional baseball was happy to have intellectuals hanging around the clubhouse and the commissioner’s office and the GM’s suite. Well, perhaps not happy, but not disturbed either, so long as the intellectuals had no practical consequences for how baseball was played, and by whom. Baseball offered a comfortable seat to the polysyllabic wonders who quoted dead authors and blathered on about the poetry of motion. These people dignified the game, like a bow tie. They were harmless. What was threatening was cold, hard intelligence.
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