STATS Inc. founder Dick Cramer told a story with the flavor of the deeper problem. In the early days, through fluky circumstances, Cramer had sold his data collection and analysis service to the Houston Astros. The Astros’ GM, Al Rosen, wanted to know how the team would be affected if the Astrodome’s fences were moved in. Would the team, as currently composed, do better or worse in a smaller, more hitter-friendly park? Cramer ran the numbers-showing the relative propensity of the Astros versus their opponents to hit long pop flies—and told Rosen, “Sorry, if you do that, you lose more games.” Instead of deciding not to move the fences in, Rosen decided that the information could never be made public. “All of a sudden it is classified information,” said Cramer, “It was ‘We can’t tell anyone! My God, we can’t let this information get out! Imagine the effect on our pitchers!’” They didn’t want the information to inform the decision. They’d already made the decision. (They believed home runs sold tickets.) They wanted the information, in some sense, to avoid having to deal with its implications.
In 1985, STATS Inc. gave up trying to sell their superior data to teams and began to sell it to fans. Their timing could not have been better: the baseball fan was changing in a way that made him a natural customer of STATS Inc. A new kind of fan, with a quasipractical interest in baseball statistics, had been invented. In 1980 a group of friends, led by Sports Illustrated writer Dan Okrent, met at La Rotisserie Française, a restaurant in Manhattan, and created what became known, to the confusion of a nation, as Rotisserie Baseball. Okrent can plausibly be said to have “discovered” Bill James. Okrent was one of those seventy-five people who, in 1977, ran across the one-inch ad in The Sporting News James took out and sent off his check to Lawrence, Kansas. Back came an unpromising mimeograph. Then he read it. “I was absolutely dumbstruck,” he said. “I couldn’t believe that (a) this guy existed and (b) he hadn’t been discovered.”
Okrent flew to Lawrence to make sure James indeed existed, then wrote a piece about him for Sports Illustrated. It was killed: James’s arrival on the national sporting scene was delayed by a year, after the Sports Illustrated fact-checker spiked the piece. “She went through it line by line,” recalled Okrent, “saying, ‘Everyone knows this isn’t true. Everyone knows that Nolan Ryan attracted a bigger crowd when he pitched, that Gene Tenace was a bad hitter, that…’” Conventional opinions about baseball players and baseball strategies had acquired the authority of fact, and the Sports Illustrated fact-checking department was not going to let evidence to the contrary see print. The following year, an editor who had been unable to shake Okrent’s piece from his mind asked Okrent to try again. He did, and the piece was published, and Bill James was introduced to a wider audience. The year afte that, 1982, a New York publisher, Ballantine Books, brought out the Baseball Abstract, and made it a national best-seller.
Many of James’s new readers were Rotisserie Baseball fanatics. The game, which sought to simulate an actual baseball game, put the players in the role of general manager of a team of real life baseball players, which he picked himself from actual teams. Each morning he’d get up and go to the box scores in the newspaper to calculate how his “team” had done. Over the next decade some immeasurable but vast number of Americans—millions, certainly—took to the game, many of them obsessively. That they should have developed a special interest in Bill James was strange, in a way. The fantasy games were premised on the old-fashioned statistics, the pre-Jamesean understanding of baseball. The general manager of a Rotisserie team measured his success by toting up batting averages, RBIs, stolen bases, and so on. To win one’s Rotisserie League you needed to behave pretty much like bone-headed general managers. You needed to overpay for RBIs and batting averages and stolen bases; you had no use for on-base and slugging percentages. You certainly didn’t need access to the growing corpus of new baseball knowledge. Rotisserie Baseball was, if anything, a force for encouraging the conventional view of baseball.
Nevertheless! The fans were more keenly interested in the information they needed to make intelligent baseball decisions—even if they themselves did not directly benefit from making intelligent baseball decisions—than the people who ran the real teams. They needed it, or thought they needed it, to win their fantasy games. As James later admitted, the desire to win these games had been a chief motive for his original rethinking of the game. Before the sophisticated baseball fantasy leagues there had been sophisticated table-top baseball games. “I used to be in a table-game league,” James confessed to his readers a decade later. “This was ten, twelve years ago…. It was during this period, in trying to win that league, that I became obsessed with how an offense works and why it doesn’t work sometimes…with finding what information you would need to have to simulate baseball in a more accurate way. I had thought about these things before, of course, but to win that damn [table league] I had to know.”
James knew better than just about anyone on the planet just how many people were taking to these fantasy games, and how widespread was the desire to play at being the general manager of a big league baseball team, and, therefore, how deep the interest in baseball statistics. He became an investor and creative director of the newly energized STATS Inc. The company grew rapidly—ESPN was a customer from the start and USA Today soon became one. It became the leading source of information to the baseball fan until it was sold in 1999 for $45 million to Fox News Corporation.
The company was a success, but of a curious kind: what should have happened didn’t happen. What should have happened is this: real, as opposed to fantasy, general managers would engage with this new, growing body of knowledge. The Jamesean movement set the table for the geeks to rush in and take over the general management of the game. Everywhere one turned in competitive markets, technology was offering the people who understood it an edge. What was happening to capitalism should have happened to baseball: the technical man with his analytical magic should have risen to prominence in baseball management, just as he was rising to prominence on, say, Wall Street.
What the baseball professionals did do, on occasion, beginning in the early 1980s, was to hire some guy who knew how to switch on the computer. But they did this less with honest curiosity than in the spirit of a beleaguered visitor to Morocco hiring a tour guide: pay off one so that the seventy-five others will stop trying to trade you their camels for your wife. Which one you pay off is largely irrelevant. Some stat head would impress himself upon a general manager as the sort of guy who crunched numbers and the GM would find him a small office in the back.
The lack of discrimination of the few baseball GMs who went shopping for a James manque led to what might be called Elephant Man moments. The Elephant Man moment came when the beat reporter for the local team pulled back the curtain on the front office and revealed the shriveled-up fellow with bizarre facial hair punching numbers into a Mac. The brains of the operation! The crowd invariably shrieked and recoiled. The most dramatic Elephant Man moment was probably when an oddity named Mike Gimbel hired by the Boston Red Sox didn’t wait to be exposed but bodily hurled himself into the Boston sports pages, by claiming responsibility for the shrewd moves made by the Red Sox GM, Dan Duquette. The Boston Globe explained to Red Sox fans that this new intellectual force behind the team was “a Queens Community College dropout, a self-taught computer programmer and a Rotisserie League fanatic whose Brooklyn loft was raided three years ago by police because of his six pet caimans—South American alligators—that he kept in an indoor pond in his loft. The cops also confiscated his five turtles and an iguana.” The New England Sports Service ran the same story with the headline: Stats Freak Has Duquette’s Ear. “By day Gimbel lives in Brooklyn and works for the Bureau of Water Supply in New York,” it began, groping for just the right combination of words and images to infuriate the Red Sox season ticket holder. “It’s as if a computer savvy Ed Norton had become the Red Sox secret weapon. Gimbel is unorthodox in virtually every way. In 80 degree Florida weather yesterday, Gimbe
l appeared ready for a trip to Siberia, with long pants, a long sleeve shirt and a jacket. His approach to evaluating baseball is more out of the ordinary. He cautions against watching too many games….”
Duquette waited until the end of the season, then let Gimbel know his contract wouldn’t be renewed—thus proving to the world just how critical he was to the Boston Red Sox.
By the early 1990s it was clear that “sabermetrics,” the search for new baseball knowledge, was an activity that would take place mainly outside of baseball. You could count on one hand the number of “sabermetricians” inside of baseball, and none of them appears to have had much effect. After a while they seemed more like fans who second-guessed the general manager than advisers who influenced decisions. They were forever waving printouts to show how foolish the GM had been not to have taken their advice. A man named Craig Wright spent many frustrating years as the sabermetrician with the Texas Rangers, and then many more consulting other big league teams. He eventually quit his profession altogether. “I needed to be a GM if I was going to see my stuff ever used,” he said. “And I never even got asked to interview for a single GM job.” Eddie Epstein—the young government economist whose interest in baseball analysis had been inflamed by James’s writing—got himself hired by the Baltimore Orioles and the San Diego Padres but he, too, wound up quitting in a huff. The Padres executive responsible for hiring him, Larry Lucchino, freely acknowledged that the small group inside baseball searching for new baseball knowledge “was a cult. The cult status of it meant it was something that could be discarded easily. There was a profusion of new knowledge and it was ignored.”
Well into the late 1990s you didn’t have to look at big league baseball very closely to see its fierce unwillingness to rethink anything. It was as if it had been inoculated against outside ideas. For instance, a new kind of rich person named John Henry bought the Florida Marlins in January 1999. Most baseball owners were either heirs, or empire builders of one sort or another, or both. Henry had made his money in the intelligent end of the financial markets. He had an instinctive feel for the way statistical analysis could turn up inefficiencies in human affairs. Inefficiencies in the financial markets had made Henry a billionaire—and he saw some familiar idiocies in the market for baseball players. As Henry later wrote in a letter to ESPN’s Rob Neyer:
People in both fields operate with beliefs and biases. To the extent you can eliminate both and replace them with data, you gain a clear advantage. Many people think they are smarter than others in the stock market and that the market itself has no intrinsic intelligence—as if it’s inert. Many people think they are smarter than others in baseball and that the game on the field is simply what they think it is through their set of images/beliefs. Actual data from the market means more than individual perception/belief. The same is true in baseball.
Henry was, unsurprisingly, a longtime Bill James reader. Even after he became the owner of a real big league baseball team, Henry continued to play in a sophisticated fantasy league in which he deployed Jamesean tools and, as he put it, “cleaned up. I won every year.” But the real baseball team he owned continued to be run as if Bill James had never existed, and it didn’t clean up anything but its shattered pride after ninety-eight losses.
The problem Henry faced was social and political. For a man who had never played professional baseball to impose upon even a pathetic major league franchise an entirely new way of doing things meant alienating the baseball insiders he employed: the manager, the scouts, the players. In the end, he would have been ostracized by his own organization. And what was the point of being in baseball if you weren’t in baseball?
Right from the start Bill James assumed he had been writing for, not a mass audience, but a tiny group of people intensely interested in baseball. He wound up with a mass audience and went largely unread by the people most intensely interested in baseball: the men who ran the teams. Right through the 1980s and 1990s, James experienced only two responses to his work from baseball professionals. The first was opportunism from player agents, who wanted him to help them to demonstrate, in salary arbitration meetings with the teams, that their clients were underpaid. The other was hostility from the subcontractors who kept the stats for Major League Baseball.
When the Jamesean movement first took shape, the attitude toward baseball statistics inside the company whose job it was to keep the official statistics for Major League Baseball was an odd mixture of possessiveness and indifference. In the late 1970s, the baseball writer Dan Okrent, with two colleagues from book publishing, went to pitch an idea to the CEO of the Elias Sports Bureau, Seymour Siwoff. The idea, recalled Okrent, “was to try to persuade him to collaborate with us on a painstakingly detailed, under-the-fingernails things you never knew book about baseball stats. The image is indelible: We are sitting there with this guy who looks like a superannuated ferret, his pale skinny arms protruding from the billowing short sleeves of his white-on-white shirt, and he brushes us off with a dismissive wave of his hand. ‘Boys,’ he said, ‘nobody gives a shit about this stuff.’”
In 1985 the Elias Bureau finally woke up and published a book, a virtual twin in outward appearance to the 1985 Baseball Abstract, called the 1985 Elias Baseball Analyst. (The superannuated ferret was a co-author.) Although the company finally divulged some of the statistics they had long withheld from James and other analysts, they failed to do anything much with them. The writers imitated James’s prose style but, lacking anything interesting to say, they wound up sounding empty and arch. James was happy to confirm the casual reader’s impression that the Elias Bureau had a whiff of Salieri about it. “When the Baseball Abstract hit the bestseller lists,” James wrote in his final Abstract,
the [Elias Bureau] launched their own competitor, the main purposes of which were to:
a) make money
b) steal all of my ideas
c) make as many disparaging comments as possible about me
So that was a lot of fun.
The effect on James of being ignored by the people who stood to benefit the most from his work was to distance himself even further from those people. In his earlier writings James often tried to explain what he was up to, in such a way that it might invite baseball professionals to pay attention. His instinct, at first, was to assume that the people who actually managed baseball teams had some good reason for what they were doing, even when what they were doing struck him as foolish. A few years into his career, he clearly decided that baseball professionals would benefit from being smacked on the head by a two-by-four. In his commentary about the Cleveland Indians that year, for instance, he wrote that “during the winter I was told something about the Indians’ front office that really shocked me. They’re dumb. You know, not bright, slow.” He went on to explain how he at first refused to accept stupidity as an explanation for the Indians’ ineptitude because “there is so much hope invested in a ball club, there are so many people who care about the fortunes even of the Indians and who are honestly hurt, if only in passing (but we are all only passing) that it just seems inconceivable that these fortunes could be entrusted to someone who is incapable of taking care of them. Are children allowed to play catch with the family jewels?…I have a correspondent who is an avid Indians fan, a professor of math at a fine university. He understands what needs to be done. Why can’t he be given the job?”
Seven years into his literary career, in the 1984 Baseball Abstract, James formally gave up any hope that baseball insiders would be reasonable. “When I started writing I thought if I proved X was a stupid thing to do that people would stop doing X,” he said. “I was wrong.” He began his opening essay of 1984, ominously, by pointing out the boom in sports journalism that promised to take you “inside the game.” The media had become hell-bent on giving the superficial impression of allowing the fan a glimpse of the heart of every matter. Just to glance at the titles on TV shows and magazine articles you might think that there was nothing left
inside to uncover.
It was all a lie. “What has really happened,” James wrote, “is that the walls between the public and the participants of sports are growing higher and higher and thicker and darker, and the media is developing a sense of desperation about the whole thing.” What was true about baseball was true about other spheres of American public life and, to James, the only sensible approach was to drop the pretense and embrace one’s status as an outsider. “This is outside baseball,” he wrote. “This is a book about what baseball looks like if you step back from it and study it intensely and minutely, but from a distance.” It wasn’t that it was better to be an outsider; it was necessary. “Since we are outsiders,” he wrote, “since the players are going to put up walls to keep us out here, let us use our position as outsiders to what advantage we can.”
From here until James quit writing his Abstract four years later he might as well have declared open season on insiders. He became somewhat slower to concede baseball professionals might have a point. One sentence serves as a fair summary of James’s attitude toward the inside: “I think, really, that this is one reason that so many intelligent people drift away from baseball (when they come of age), that if you care about it at all you have to realize, as soon as you acquire a taste for independent thought, that a great portion of the sport’s traditional knowledge is ridiculous hokum.”
As baseball’s leading analyst, James slid between two stools. Baseball insiders thought of him as some weird kind of journalist who had no real business with them. Baseball outsiders thought of him as a statistician who knew technical things about baseball. A number cruncher. A propeller head. Even after he had become known for his books—even after he changed the way many readers thought not only about baseball but about other things too—James never got himself thought of as a “writer.”* That was a pity. A number cruncher is precisely what James was not. His work tested many hypotheses about baseball directly against hard data—and sometimes did violence to the laws of statistics. But it also tested, less intentionally, a hypothesis about literature: if you write well enough about a single subject, even a subject seemingly as trivial as baseball statistics, you needn’t write about anything else.
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