Bill James often talked about baseball careers being like watermelons. Even with the best of them, you had what he called the meat of the melon, the center part that was the ripest and easiest section to enjoy, but to get to them, you have to deal with rinds.
“Whenever you sign a player over the age of 28, you are buying into a market that is certain to decline,” he writes about the 1987 Baltimore Orioles, a team with a fair number of 30-and-over players.
Age is the great killer of talent, James would say. Apparently, the same thinking guided James himself, who made the 1988 edition of the Bill James Baseball Abstract his swansong, just a dozen years after it began. In a postscript, he claims to have lost his joy.
While it was a shame to lose that distinctive voice on the year-to-year exigencies of the game, I can’t help but feel James did the right thing walking away when he did. His writing is still excellent, even when you get rinds where the writer comes off increasingly burned out and cranky.
To the end, James churned out pioneering work in the field of sabermetrics. In this, the final Baseball Abstract, he introduces the concept of game scores for pitchers and a related one about cheap wins and tough losses, attempts to quantify the importance of intelligence in base-running, and details the dynamics of platoon differentials.
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| Total attendance at baseball games was over 52 million in 1987, an increase of five million from the prior season. "There were only three major-league teams last year that had a winning record but failed to draw two million fans," James observes. Image from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/shea-stadium-1980s--733031276821629093/ |
All the while, he offers probing, often opinionated, sometimes hilarious takes on the teams who competed in the 1987 season:
There are a number of arguments that are made in favor of the running game as having incidental benefits. As a rule, I don’t buy them. In the specific case of the 1987 St. Louis Cardinals, I do....
[Red Sox Manager John] McNamara is the father of the minimalist school of managing; his forthcoming book on managerial strategy is sure to be entitled Let Them Play and See What Happens....
The Reds have had exactly the same record at home and on the road in each of the last two seasons, 43-38 both places in 1986, 42-39 both places last year. (I would check to see whether this has ever happened before except that I don’t care.)
The World Series winner in 1987 is not one you are likely to know, even if you follow baseball and are familiar with that era. It was a rare non-big market team that won it, the Minnesota Twins. As they also won the 1991 World Series, a much more memorable contest which also went seven games, the 1987 Series gets obscured. At least I tend to forget it.
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| First baseman Kent Hrbek (#14) and his teammates celebrate the final out in the 1987 World Series, the first time the Minnesota Twins won it all. They did it despite losing nearly twice as often on the road, 29-52. "Not only did they not win on the road, but often they were not even in the game," James writes. Image from https://www.sportskeeda.com/baseball/minnesota-twins-world-series-championships |
The 1987 Twins were anchored by outfielder Kirby Puckett, first baseman Kent Hrbek, third baseman Gary Gaetti, and starting pitchers Bert Blyleven and Frank Viola. The performances of the latter two get James going on a fruitful tangent, reflecting on the idea that there is a “gap” in team performance whenever the starting pitcher is someone other than its two winningest pitchers.
James offers examples of how this works and doesn’t. The Twins didn’t actually have that great a season record, finishing .525, lowest ever for any World Champion to that point. Yes, they were more successful with Blyleven and Viola, just not unnaturally so:
The Oakland A’s of 1972-1974, World Champions each year, never had more than 53 wins from pitchers other than their top two, and in 1974 had only 46 wins that didn’t come from Catfish Hunter or Ken Holtzman.
Some World Series contenders, he goes on to reveal, actually had better winning percentages when their top starters did not pitch, like the 1979 Baltimore Orioles, the 1987 St. Louis Cardinals (whose manager, Whitey Herzog, prompted James’s examination by complaining of the opposing Twins, “they got two pitchers, that’s it”), and the 1948 Boston Braves, which legend had it was supposedly propped up by its two famous pitchers, Warren Spahn and Johnny Sain. James notes:
You ever hear of “Spahn and Sain and pray for rain?” That’s the team. Oddly enough, the one team in baseball history that is most famous for having only two starting pitchers was, in fact, one of the few championship teams that had a better winning percentage with the rest of the team than with the top two starters.
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| The widest gap James found between the top two starters and other pitchers on championship teams? Bobo Newsom (middle right) and Schoolboy Rowe (far right) of the 1940 Tigers compiled an .822 winning percentage (vs. .486 without them). Here they are joined by Tiger teammates Hank Greenberg (far left) and Barney McCosky. Image from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/hank-greenberg-barney-mccosky-bobo-newsom-and-schoolboy-rowe--559150109989196017/ |
The book kicks off with an amusing, meandering imagined conversation entitled “Rain Delay,” naming who is the best player in baseball. The merits of Don Mattingly of the New York Yankees, Keith Hernandez of the New York Mets, Wade Boggs of the Boston Red Sox and many others are debated before Boggs is landed upon as the best pick.
Shortstop Ozzie Smith of the Cardinals and outfielder Tony Gwynn of the San Diego Padres turn out nearly even matches. “If you compare the two, there’s an awful lot of things you can throw out because they’re even,” James writes. “Gwynn gets an extra 35, 40 hits a year – and Smith takes probably the same number away from somebody else. It’s hard to say who you’d take.”
I expected another then-Yankee, Rickey Henderson, to figure more in this discussion than he does. In the 1986 Abstract, James leaned hard on Henderson’s primacy in the game. But every season brings new contenders for that title, and James was not one to rely on past wisdom.
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| Another player mentioned as a possible equal to Wade Boggs is Tim Raines of the Montreal Expos, a hitting and base-stealing master. "If Raines had the arm to play center field, he would be more valuable than Boggs, which at this point would make him probably the best player in baseball," James writes. Photo by Ronald C. Modra from https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-sports/tim-raines-on-finally-getting-into-baseball-hall-of-fame-after-nine-tries-126668/ |
Other topics draw out his combative side, including the role of the minor leagues. Once they were a competitive institution, he notes. Now they are just a training grounds and rehab clinic:
If you’re selling a sport and the players don’t care about winning, that’s not a sport. That’s a fraud. Minor-league baseball today is exactly what the 1919 World Series was: a charade, a rip-off, an exhibition masquerading as a contest.
As a Kansas City fan, he also has a strong opinion about the Royals’s newest star, Bo Jackson, then all the rage for simultaneously taking up two professional sports, baseball and football. You have to pick one, Royals ownership and many in the baseball media were saying. James objects: “How can these people be so arrogant as to assume that they know more than Bo does about the costs of his decision?”
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| Despite his frustrations with the game, Bo Jackson amazed baseball fans with his athleticism and powerful arm. He made his biggest impression at the 1989 All-Star Game, where he was selected Most Valuable Player. Even so, he's better remembered today as a star running back. GIF from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/bo-jackson-baseball-gif-bo-jackson-baseball-athlete-discover-share-gifs--778700591837632312/ |
The biggest change James saw looming in 1987 was the reported adoption of a higher strike zone. James spends much time on this point, anticipating an imbalance between hitter and pitcher on par with that of the 1960s, when an expanded strike zone led to anemic hitting. He saw this empowering power pitchers especially:
The critical difference between 1963 and 1988 is that in 1988 we’re going to be giving these guys a high strike. That’s the pitch they need; These guys don’t throw for the knees. They’re wild high.
Looking back, I don’t think this prediction was ever validated, at least to the degree he asserts. But in naming pitchers he thought would thrive under the new system, he mentions Danny Jackson of the Cincinnati Reds, who did rack up a career-best 23 wins in 1988.
Speaking of wins, James is skeptical of their value when rating pitchers. After developing his concept for tracking cheap wins and tough losses, he determines that victories are a question more of luck and that earned-run average is a far more accurate value metric.
For example, Nolan Ryan of the Houston Astros had an 8-16 record in 1987, but if measured solely by those decisions when he pitched effectively versus those he didn’t, those numbers would have been more than reversed, 19-5.
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| Keith Hernandez of the New York Mets in 1987. James was high on the prior year's World Champs and expected them to win their division in 1988, which they did. On Hernandez's glovework: "Keith Hernandez remains the standard for his position." Image from https://calltothepen.com/2022/01/12/new-york-mets-keith-hernandez-retired-jersey/ |
James’s gift for elucidating subtle points in clear prose remains solidly in evidence in this final Baseball Abstract. So does his talent for the well-turned phrase. Talking about the existence of momentum in baseball, he runs some numbers that tell very little before concluding: “As a small child, I thought that the trees pushed the wind.”
I’m not sure I can say the 1987 Baseball Abstract was the best. I only ever read the professionally published editions from 1982 on, and as 1987 was my first Abstract, there is an inherent discovery bias for me.
There are duff comments littered throughout the book, as well as the comedy stylings of one “Mike Kopf,” which might be a joke-named James pseudonym and is in any case indulged more than he deserves.
Often James seems to be in a bitter place, especially at the end, when in an essay titled “Breakin’ The Wand” he explains he finds his career in sabermetrics too grueling to continue, especially when it comes to dealing with his fans. “I think that whenever a writer finds that he is beginning to dislike his own readers, it’s a very clear sign that he’s heading down the wrong road,” he writes.
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| Bill James in a happier place. His departure from the game in 1988 proved short-lived, though he never returned to the detailed season analysis of the Baseball Abstract. Later annual projects he worked on include The Player Rating Book, The Bill James Goldmine, and the still-going The Bill James Handbook. Image from https://maximumfun.org/episodes/bullseye-with-jesse-thorn/podcast-bill-james-legendary-baseball/ |
As far as the road he was heading down, James is non-committal. He mentions his affiliation with one statistics-gathering organization, announces his break from another, and floats the idea of passing the baton of Baseball Abstract to another writer.
That didn’t happen, though neither did a complete break from baseball. As a paid consultant to the Boston Red Sox, he enjoyed much success, and also was credited as lead writer for a series of baseball books.
But for me, and for many others, these Abstracts remain his signature legacy. James likens them to building a bridge between two mountains, one of statistics, the other of wisdom. You really get that sense of unifying thought processes in the pages of 1987 Abstract, however deceptively enjoyable it is to read. It is a fine way for a champ to go out.
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