The Bill James Baseball Abstract 1982 – Bill James, 1982 ★★½

Behold My Greatest Treasure

The Gutenberg Bible of my old book collection, it turns out, is not a first-edition Notes Of A War Correspondent (1898) by Richard Harding Davis, nor the autographed hardcover autobiography Minnie Pearl. Rather, it’s a slim paperback written by a cannery security guard turned baseball-numbers geek.

To coin a phrase, you can look it up. A worn copy of The Bill James Baseball Abstract 1982 can be had for $100 on Amazon; mint condition nets as much as $300 on Abe Books.

My own edition falls somewhere in-between. It was near-mint until a few days ago, when my beloved cat Wendy used it for a perch, digging her claws in when I tried shooing her away. My gleaming cover now has three small punctures, tangible as Braille.

When I bought the book on eBay almost a decade ago, I didn’t know it was an investment. I just wanted it because Bill James is one of the most exciting writers on any subject I know of; his choice of subject, baseball, being one of my favorites.

James’ mark on the game has been profound. His work with the Boston Red Sox helped end an 86-year drought of world championships; his popularization of sabermetrics transformed the sport’s fanbase into Excel mavens. He even did a guest shot on “The Simpsons,” saying “I’ve made baseball as fun as doing your taxes.”

James’s mojo ain’t for everyone. But back in 1982, in his sixth year of writing Abstracts, he was a man in love. He explains his passion:

The variety of stories which can be told is infinite. And it is not that the numbers fill out a story which is known from other sources, but that the bits and pieces of knowledge which we have about the ballplayers flesh out the numbers which are themselves the true story. There is no other fiction so absorbing and no other poetry so hypnotic.

How much of an impact a ballpark can have on a team’s offensive output? Did attendance size impact Reggie Jackson’s hitting? Do left-handed pitchers have an advantage picking runners off first? James devoted considerable mathematical expertise, not to mention often-snarky logic, to figuring out these and other ponderables.

The 1982 Abstract tracks such things as average game times by starting pitchers, how likely certain players are to reach 3,000 hits, why neither Babe Ruth nor Ty Cobb is the career leader in offensive wins and losses (it’s Ted Williams), and something called the Power/Speed number which he admits flat-out is a gimmick for tickling the grey cells.

For James, formulas were fun but not his mission. “It is not my purpose to convince you that Andre Dawson should have been the MVP or shouldn’t have, to convince you that Reggie Jackson is through or that he isn’t, to show you that Pete Rose will get 4,200 hits or that he won’t,” he writes. “It is my purpose to equip you with tools you can use to work on those answers for yourself.”

Don't let the gentle demeanor fool you. Bill James in his youthful prime. Image from https://www.baseballamerica.com/today/majors/anniversary/25-years/261957.html.

James begins this exploration on the Boston Red Sox team bus. It is the early 1960s, and manager Johnny Pesky, a good hitter for average in his day, is arguing with slugger Dick Stuart “at great length and full volume” over which of them was the better offensive unit.

For the rest of the chapter, the best one, James explains the different advantages of hitting for power and hitting for average, breaks down the amount of runs each produces over the course of the season, develops a complex but easy to understand formula of “runs created,” and finally brings us back to Pesky and Stuart for a surprising conclusion:

Ah, yes. Pesky/Stuart. They were arguing about nothing. There isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between them. In his three best years, Pesky created 299 runs; in his three best, Stuart created 300. Pesky did this while using 1,257 outs, Stuart while using 1,259… As hitters, the only thing to choose between is the needs of the team. If you were leaving people on base, you’d need Stuart; if you were having trouble getting on base, you’d need Pesky.

This is the kind of stuff I love from James, not just the statistical analysis but the way he develops it to serve a larger point, often surprising or charming and sometimes – like here – both.

The 1982 Baseball Abstract was the first ever commercially-produced edition; prior editions were self-published. Covering the 1981 baseball season, it addresses such pressing matters as the dismissal of manager Dick Williams from the Montreal Expos (even as the team wound up making its only post-season appearance that year); the remarkable durability of star pitchers like Tom Seaver, Nolan Ryan, and Steve Carlton, all rolling along nicely in their third calendar decade of work; and a ruinous players’ strike which stopped play for a month and a half. Major League Baseball, for the first and only time, went with two mini-seasons that year.

James spends some time on the strike, noting how it played havoc with record-keeping and made a “disaster” out of the post-season. “Bad teams in the race; good teams out of the race,” he writes. James notes how the two best National League teams in 1981, the Cincinnati Reds and the St. Louis Cardinals, were shut out of the postseason because of this set-up:

When baseball needs to change, needs to address a problem, then I’m not going to be one of the millions digging in my heels and screaming that the men with the money are dragging us all down the road to ruin. I can accept change; it is this change I don’t like. I will be real happy if I never hear the words split season again.

Mostly James avoids the topic in favor of other controversies. He inveighs about the Toronto Blue Jays’s management in his summary of that team’s season, amusingly headlined: “A Man’s Outhouse Is His Castle If He Holds His Nose and Pretends The Flies Are Pigeons.”

Then he turns his attention to the Minnesota Twins’ famously cheap (and racist) owner, Calvin Griffith:

What you really are, Calvin – somebody should have explained this to you before – is not a businessman; you’re the north end of a south-bound Brontosaurus. And the best thing you could possibly do for the rest of us, if you wouldn’t mind, is to quit your living sermon on the virtues of being miserable and go quietly about the process of becoming extinct.

This sort of candor can be refreshing, though it too easily devolves into cruelty. Take his take on Chicago White Sox designated hitter Greg Luzinski, LeFatty, James dubs him. “With a player like Greg Luzinski around, it seems a shame to live in such a polite era,” he writes, then goes on anyway to have fun at his nickname, “The Bull” suggesting something more “porcine.”

This side of James eventually grew into an unpleasant Mr. Hyde aspect of his character. (See his later Whatever Happened To The Hall Of Fame for more of it.) Bigger drawbacks to the 1982 Abstract are his deeper dives into statistical analysis, which come off more strained than sensible. I have no idea why Larry Bowa was a “mediocre shortstop” even after reading James’s numbers-heavy explanation, while a long analysis of aging’s effect on ballplayers goes on a while saying little.

I can't stand Larry Bowa, but James left me feeling sorry for the guy. If he didn't last as long as he did in the majors (16 seasons) because of his glovework, as James dismisses so casually, what was it? Certainly not his sunny temperament. Image from https://twitter.com/fakelarrybowa.

Maybe he was just too deep in the weeds for me; but I find his numbers-based explorations in later Abstracts and the 1988 Historical Baseball Abstract more comprehensible and clearer than they are here. I think he was still growing into his prime bringing his analytical and writerly talents into tandem.

Even when arcane, James is still amusing. Explicating a runs-produced formula, he cheerfully admits to taking a shortcut: “Hit batsmen are excluded here because frankly I didn’t want to be bothered with them.” He also announces a pet project for analyzing various pitcher motions towards an alphabetized formula. This likely never took off but is fun to read anyway, catching James the detail detective in fine form:

Larry Gura seems to be the only pitcher in the American League who, instead of kicking his leg into the air, hurls it around his pivot leg. Some pitchers do this on their stretch move. Mike Caldwell of the Brewers has a rather odd motion in which he kicks his right leg upward but bends it sharply at the knee so that it, too, is almost curled around the pivot leg, but in a very different way. It looks frankly as if he was trying to kick himself in the crotch; logic tells you that he probably isn’t.

A lot of people don’t care anymore about pitchers like Gura and Caldwell. For those of us who do, it’s a pleasure seeing their moments in the spotlight examined by someone as wry and sharp as James.

For a lot of the 1982 Abstract, James proves solidly on point, like when he notes the shallowness of the New York Yankees’ talent pool as evidence the team was in for a long dry spell after enjoying five big winning seasons in the prior six years (it was) or the Milwaukee Brewers’ need to give that young kid Paul Molitor more of a chance. They did, and he went on to Cooperstown.

More than getting things right, there is a persistent richness of observation which gives this Abstract high overall readability. As a New York Mets fan, I enjoyed his take on a young and largely talentless team struggling to find its way; sad-sack teams seemed to bring out James’ empathy that way without blinding him with sentiment.

The big drawback on the 1982 Abstract remains its chief attraction for me: It’s a time capsule of baseball as it was and never will be again.