Any book crammed with more a century of lore can’t help but fascinate. That is especially true for me when the subject is baseball and the writer is Bill James, a scholar who brings both a deep analytical perspective and sharply heterodox views to his writing.
In 1986, James took time out from his annual takes on the best and worst of the year in the sport to publish his magnum opus, The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract. Running over 700 pages, it reviewed baseball’s evolution decade by decade, then ranked top players at each position. As James’s mind can go off in so many fruitful directions, it was the reference book equivalent of potato chips for diamond buffs.
Fifteen years later, James went back to do it again. The result was even more players, more pages, and more insights, specifically around the concept of Win Shares. You know what? It isn’t quite as good.
Yes, it is still Bill James, ever-quotable if not always loveable, ready to launch into a soliloquy about which players were best when it came to secondary averages (walks, extra bases, stolen bases) or which type of pitcher is most likely to have a longer career. You get his notes on late-20th century legends like Barry Bonds and Derek Jeter, as well as more rounded appreciations of the two best baseball decades I witnessed, the 1970s and 1980s:
The balance between hitting and pitching, which lurched in one direction in the 1960s and in the opposite direction in the 1990s, was at a good point in the 1970s…. It was a game that put the full athletic ability of the players on display in a way that was very satisfying, very exciting.
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| Barry Bonds at work. James rates him the third best left fielder to ever play, behind only Ted Williams and Stan Musial. "[Ken Griffey Jr.] has always been more popular, but Bonds has been a far, far better player," James writes. GIF from https://makeagif.com/gif/barry-bonds-highlights-pure-greatness-ymzKUC |
With power hitting so widespread today, why does Hack Wilson’s 1930 record of 191 RBI remain so unassailable? James says it is all about opportunity: “In modern baseball, everybody tries to hit home runs, spreading the offense top to bottom, but creating no clusters of RBI opportunities.”
His takes on the history of the game itself are also worthwhile. Often, he pushes against the romanticized ideals about baseball as it existed long ago. James points out reasons against this, not just the color bar but also how the game is played:
Baseball boomed in the late forties, but this kind of baseball would drive a purist nuts – in fact, after a while it would even start to drive me nuts. Run production was high, but they were doing it all wrong. At its best, it was the baseball of the ticking bomb, the danger building up and up until somebody finally put one in the seats. At its worst it was station-to-station baseball with the trains running late, baseball with no action except the few seconds of the long fly.
This tendency for homer-centric play became more entrenched in the 1950s, by which time stealing and hit-and-run plays were minimal. “The baseball of the 1950s was perhaps the most one-dimensional, uniform, predictable version of the game which has ever been offered to the public.”
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| A game-changer from another era, Ty Cobb is ranked by James history's second-best centerfielder, behind only Willie Mays. James also ranks Cobb's rookie season the second-worst of any future Hall of Famer, just better than Mike Schmidt's. Image from https://www.baseballhistorycomesalive.com/ty-cobbs-great-season-1911/ |
A big believer in weighting statistical performance by specific players against the eras in which they player, James often demurs about the greatness of certain players with high batting averages who played when hitting safely was more normal, or power pitchers who pitched when the mound was higher or the ball not as easy to see.
Talking about Larry Walker, a Colorado Rockies outfielder who hit impressively in the snug confines of Coors Field back in the 1990s, James makes this point:
It will be interesting to see, as time goes by, how well the Hall of Fame voters can see through the phony batting stats of the 1994-2000 era, and pick out the genuinely great players from those who piled up numbers because of the unusual conditions in which they played.
Walker did get into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2020. Regarding those “unusual conditions,” that is as close as this book ever touches on the question of steroids and how they affected play. Walker’s own record on steroids is as clean as can be, but many other 1990s power hitters like Bonds and Sammy Sosa were caught out by their use of banned supplements. But when James discusses their careers, it is with no mention of chemical enhancement, though the subject was in the air.
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| Roger Clemens is named by James the 11th greatest pitcher of all time, ahead of all others from the late 1980s and after. James notes his ability to win consistently while often saddled with weaker clubs than his nearest 1990s rival, Greg Maddux. Photo by Ronald C. Modra from https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/29160691/tim-kurkjian-baseball-fix-roger-clemens-was-power-pitcher-start-finish |
Most egregiously, James names Mark McGwire the third-best first baseman to ever play the game, behind only Lou Gehrig and Jimmie Foxx. “My seven-year-old son’s favorite player” is how he justifies that selection, almost entirely: “McGwire does do some things well, other than hit home runs” is his summation.
McGwire hadn’t yet confessed to steroid use when the book came out, but still, people knew. It would be surprising if James didn’t.
In most ways, James is hardly circumspect when discussing those who played the sport. His takes can veer from candid to acid. This was true in the 1986 edition, but more so here. Chipper Jones has had a great career so far, James notes, and “better is yet to come, if he can stay away from the Hooter’s Girls.”
Two aspects of the 2001 Historical Baseball Abstract not present in the earlier volume are James’s expansion of the best-players-by-position lists from ten to a hundred each; and his reliance, at times seemingly exclusive, on something called “Win Shares.” It’s a stat I don’t see much anymore, I guess it has been supplanted by Wins Above Replacement. But whatever the Win Share formula, it’s fairly opaque to me, and James’s deep forays into its meaning and purpose left me cold.
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| Phil Rizzuto is ranked the sixteenth best shortstop of all time, six spots behind crosstown rival Pee Wee Reese. But James is still impressed, calling Rizzuto "the best shortstop ever at turning the double play, almost beyond dispute." Image from https://www.ebay.com/itm/174776544424 |
His reliance on this tool only obscures the reasons for choosing certain players over others. Ron Santo played third base around the same time as Brooks Robinson, the 1960s and 1970s, without nearly the same fame for his glovework, but James places Santo just above Brooksie as the sixth-best third baseman, apparently on the basis of better hitting.
Most of James’s explanation for his championing of Santo takes the form of a huffy reply to an ESPN viewer who saw him advocate for Santo’s Hall of Fame induction (which had not yet happened but did in 2012.) “Ron Santo towers far above the real standard of the real Hall of Fame,” James concludes.
I think here and elsewhere James overstates his case a lot simply to make a point. Being controversial and contrarian is his brand, and when you pick up a book with his name on it, you must be ready to deal with that. But it’s not overrating worthy players that bugs me as much as his pulling the Win Shares card to explain it. I admit I don’t get Win Shares, but I think they far overweigh the hitting side of the game, which isn’t really germane to rating them by position anyway.
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| Though his career stats aren't eye-popping, Jose Cruz racked up good hitting and stolen-base numbers at a home park, the Astrodome, that James says "ruined" his numbers by being so pitcher-friendly. James ranks Cruz the 29th best leftfielder of all time, just ahead of Heinie Manush and Joe Carter. Image from https://x.com/LILFBaseball/status/1681665199873593344 |
The inclusion of so many players by position dilutes the book in other ways. Gifted as he is at commentary, there are only so many things he can say about a good shortstop or outfielder. James sometimes errs on the side of curtness. Nineteenth-century rightfielder Buck Freeman is chosen the 87th best ever at his position, with this explanation:
There are some players in baseball history about whom nobody really knows much of anything. Freeman appears to be one of them.
To be fair, that’s not all he offers. James also includes a couple of quotations from Freeman’s contemporaries, as he does with many other players. These quotations range from insightful to frivolous, but hardly ever serve the purpose of explaining his rankings.
Still, this is a very enjoyable book, with James waxing eloquent about a great number of players in any number of ways. He still has his marvelous essay from the 1986 edition on the famously crooked first baseman Hal Chase, which begins: “Could he really have existed, or was he perhaps invented by Robert Louis Stevenson…”
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| In addition to listing the greats, James also calls out characters and curiosities in baseball over the years, like Bumpus Jones, who pitched a no-hitter for the Cincinnati Reds in his major league debut: "He would win only one more major league game, being released in mid-season, 1893, with a career record of two wins, four losses, and a 7.99 ERA." Image from https://www.nonohitters.com/2020/10/15/bumpus-jones-no-hitter-in-1st-appearance-128-years-ago-today/ |
Newer entries are just as amusing, including that for shortstop Roger Peckinpaugh, a teammate of Babe Ruth’s:
Peckinpaugh, named MVP before the start of the 1925 World Series, then made a record eight errors in the series, prompting a reporter to comment that Peckinpaugh was not only the MVP of the American League, but of the National League as well.
James writes at length on each decade in the major leagues, detailing their stars, their trends, even the nicknames. He also spends a chapter on the Negro Leagues, whose legends aren’t ranked in his player listings unless they went on to significant careers in the major leagues. Given James’s statistical focus, this makes sense, as one can’t compare Oscar Charleston or Josh Gibson to Ozzie Smith or the Babe the same way.
One place James does not go at all is professional baseball pre-1876, which he explains similarly as being too embedded in myth to analyze. “The baseball years between 1858 and 1875 can be likened roughly to the early years of the Old Testament, the era of the Pharaohs and the Trojan Wars, about which there are sketchy records…” he writes.
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| One clear improvement in baseball James notes is the quality of the modern ballpark, like Miller Park in Milwaukee, above. "To state the matter without hyperbole, the finest ballpark in the United States in 1879 would today be considered substandard for the Florida State League," James writes. Image from https://www.chicagomag.com/chicago-magazine/july-2008/playing-the-fields/ |
In addition to being a tidier package overall, the earlier Historical Baseball Abstract had other things going for it. In that book, but not this one, he ranked the best players in terms of both “peak value” versus “career value,” which was helpful. This time, best seasons are weighted in the Win Share formula, but not spelled out in terms of player standing.
Likewise, the pitchers are no longer separated by right-handed and left-handed starters, or by starters and relievers. They are all just grouped together in a single stack of 100.
The fact this was published over 20 years ago makes the New Historical Baseball Abstract a relic itself today. There is no mention of Ichiro Suzuki or Tim Lincecum, let alone Shohei Ohtani or Mike Trout. Inevitably, any book that takes on the entire game risks obsolescence if the game is still being played. And while reading it cover to cover is a chore not worth recommending, there is much pleasure and enlightenment to be gained by dipping into it from time to time.
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