![]() |
Abstracts From The Abstracts
(After taking a pause for the postseason, the twelve-part Abstracts From The Abstracts series resumes.) Part Eight: 1984 Baseball Abstract
In his Welcome page, James announces the new changes for this year's Abstract, including hiring Jim Baker as his assistant; replacing two of the three runs created formulas used in the previous year's Abstract with new ones; changing the method by which players are rated "in light of new knowledge that has been developed;" introducing a section that discusses the characteristics of the managers in the American League; and the onset of Project Scoresheet, "which is one of the biggest things in my life right now." James concludes the introductory page with the following statement: "I'm sort of a baseball agnostic; I make it a point never to believe anything just because it is widely known to be so." In Inside-Out Perspective, James discusses the trend toward "inside stuff" in sportswriting when, in fact, "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." This is outside baseball. This is a book about what baseball looks like if you step back from it and study it immensely and minutely, but from a distance. James admits, "I can't tell you what a locker room smells like, praise the Lord." But perspective can be gained only when details are lost. A sense of the size of everything and the relationships between everything--this can never be put together from details. For the most essential fact of a forest is this: The forest itself is immensely larger than anything inside of it. That is why, of course, you can't see the forest for the trees; each detail, in proportion to its size and your proximity to it, obscures a thousand or a million other details. James asks if you can tell the height of a tree by standing beside it and looking up. "No, of course not; it's too big." He says you must stand back and look at the tree from a distance to get an idea how tall it is. I've never said, never thought, that it was better to be an outsider than it was to be an insider, that my view of the game was better than anyone else's. It's different; better in some ways, worse in some ways. What I have said is, since we are outsiders, 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. Let us back off from the trees, look at the forest as a whole, and see what we can learn from that. Let us stop prentending to be insiders if we're not. Let us fly over the forest, you and I, and look down; let us measure every tract of land and map out all the groves, and draw in every path that connects each living thing. Let us drive around the edges and photograph each and every tree from a variety of angles and with a variety of lenses; and insiders will be amazed at what we can help them to see. Well, how is that for foresight? Two decades later, not only have Billy Beane, J.P. Ricciardi, Theo Epstein, and Paul DePodesta been hired as General Managers but our man Bill James is now the Senior Baseball Operations Advisor for the World Series championship team. In Logic and Methods in Baseball Analysis, James states axioms, corollaries, and the known principles of sabermetrics in the following order: That probably sounds so simple as to be childish; it is. It is, at the same time, one of the least understood basic truths about an offense or about an offensive player. The ratio between a team's wins and its losses will be the ratio between the square of their runs scored and the square of their runs allowed. This is called the Pythagorean approach to won/lost percentage. If you score three runs for every two scored by your opponent, you'll win nine games for each four that he wins. If you score four to his three, you'll win sixteen games to his nine. If there is just one takeaway from the 1984 Baseball Abstract, it is the above truisms. Read, study, and memorize 'em. You will become a more intelligent student of the game. James spends two short chapters on Victory Important RBI and RBI Importance in an attempt to measure "clutch performance," which is not to be confused with "clutch ability"--an area "I see little point in talking about." James later tweaked his runs created formula to account for deviations in performance in clutch hitting, and he uses this advanced version in calculating Win Shares where situational data is available. Moving to Section II (The Teams), James compares Montreal Expos first baseman When you add all this together, Oliver created 81 runs while using 458 outs, which is 4.79 runs per game; Brock created 64 runs while using 371 outs, which is 4.69 per game. Further, Brock created his runs in Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, where runs are scarcer and therefore more valuable than they are in Olympic Stadium in Montreal. When park adjustments are taken into account, Brock actually had a slightly better offensive season than did Al Oliver. Although the Chicago Cubs were coming off a 71-91 fifth-place finish the previous year, James encourages readers to take anyone up on a 100:1 offer against winning the N.L. East in 1984. He points to the team's 79-83 Pythagorean record; the change in managers from Lee Elia to Jim Frey; miracles taking place "in leagues where the difference between the best teams and the worst teams is not wide;" the problems of the incumbent division champion (Phillies); steps taken in the winter to improve the team's pitching; and the worst record in baseball on artificial turf (13-35), a "specific, correctable weakness." (Editor's note: The Cubs finished in first place in 1984 with a 96-65 record.) In the San Diego Padres comments, James highlights the fact that the team scored 653 runs versus a projected total based on the runs created formula of 602. He attributes the difference partially to the Padres infield (not the players but the playing surface, which resulted in an unusually large number of errors) as well as the effect of a "1-to-4 offense"--an offense that began with James claims "you cannot win a pennant with a four-man offense." I wonder if that adage could be updated to "you cannot win a World Series with a four-man offense" in view of the makeup of this year's Red Sox and Cardinals teams? In a segment entitled "The Future of James shows us his sense of humor in the opening paragraph of the Detroit Tigers comments. I wrote an article last summer for the Detroit Free Press (for which, by the way, they never paid me. So that's what that means; I'd been wondering since I was a kid how they could stay in business giving their paper away.) With the Yankees in the early stages of the franchise's biggest dryspell since the pre- Another thing that I think people often underestimate is how difficult it can be to accurately assess your needs. A lot of the free-agent signings that have been made in response to needs, it seems to me, have worked out badly. The Padres signed Steinbrenner accused of overspending? Dog bites man. The only thing that has changed over the years is the size of the Yankees' payroll--a more than tenfold increase from 1984 to 2004. In the Toronto Blue Jays section, James gives Bobby Cox (then 42) credit for being one of a handful of managers who understands the distribution of talent in the major leagues. "Talent in baseball is not normally distributed. This is a fundamental fact of baseball life, and if you have any analytical interest in the game it is terrifically important to understand that." He points out that the most common level in the general population is the norm whereas in major league baseball it is the bottom, "the worst fellow out there." As such, "far more players are below average than are above average. You will always find that those who are above average are further from the average in absolute terms than those who are below average." James believes Project Scoresheet will definitively answer questions about baserunning, "one of baseball's unmeasured skills." Baserunning is perfectly measurable; it can be easily defined and, given properly maintained scoresheets, easily researched. Our lack of knowledge on the subject is attributable entirely to record-keeping decisions that were made a little over a century ago and have never been intelligently or systematically reviewed. We know so much about hitting that we can talk about it forever and measure it with extraordinary precision because a few men, at the beginning of Time, made some very good decisions about how to record and organize information, decisions that are now so natural a part of our thinking about the game that it is difficult even to see that any decision had ever to be made. If this information is known today, it sure isn't widely disseminated. Why don't we know how often (in absolute terms and as a percentage of opportunities) various runners go from first to third on a single, first to home on a double, or second to home on a single? How often does Ichiro Suzuki reach base on an error as opposed to the average batter? Are we limited in recording the data or in distributing the data? Until this information is made available to the public, our ability to fully understand and appreciate all the nuances of the game and its players will be constrained. With respect to computers and its effects on baseball, James says "it is not going to do anything and it is not going to change anything." We are going to do things with the computer. You and I are going to change the world, and we're gong to change baseball, and we're going to use the computer to do it. Machines have no capabilities of their own. Your car cannot drive to Cleveland. What machines do is extend our capabilities. In Section III (Player Ratings), James writes separate essays in favor of and against "the idea of rating ballplayers." He concedes the reason for rating players is because "it sells books, and I have to make a living." However, James says the ratings provide a framework for his comments on players and cautions that his opinions "are offered in the spirit of fun." I am very leery of "great statistics," of statistics which consider everything and provide the once and final answer to great baseball questions, questions like "Who was the greatest player ever?" or "Who should have won the MVP award?" or "Who really belongs in the Hall of Fame?" or even, "Who is better, Dawson or Murphy?" It is my considered opinion that we have no business answering those questions by formula. James believes that great statistics "consume knowledge but don't yield it. They are not a part of the discussion, they are the end of a discussion." Bad sabermetrics attempts to end the discussion by saying that I have studied the issue and this is the answer. Good sabermetrics attempts to contribute to the discussion in such a way as to enable it to move forward on a ground of shared understanding. James questions great statistics because they "define out of existence everything that is not included in their measurement" (such as knowing how many times a player was out attempting to take an extra base, how many times a player gave away a base by throwing to the wrong one, how many runs an outfielder prevents by keeping runners on third base, or how many runs a catcher saves by his ability to call pitches or his ability to spot a problem with the pitcher's delivery). "And this is only the shadow of the monster; our whole ignorance is much larger than we can conceive of." The work of sabermetrics is not to ignore all of these considerations or to deny them, but to find ways to deal with them. Given enough good sabermetricians, those ways can and will be found. Bad sabermetricians characteristically insist that those things which cannot be measured are not important, that they do not even exist. They run from the monster in terror, and insist that he does not really exist, that there is only That Shadow. Here are some of the more noteworthy player comments: The discussion on Harrah raises an interesting philosophical question not only in terms of defensive positioning but as it relates to the advanced defensive metrics in vogue today. Are such stats tracking the quality of the results (i.e., the percentage of hits that go for singles as opposed to doubles) or are they just measuring the quantity of the balls hit into a particular zone? "You hear that stuff every day, although most athletes are smart enough to disguise it a little better. Many athletes truly believe that they are successful at what they do not because God made them strong and fast and agile, but because they're better people than the rest of us. "...Reggie Jackson is an ordinary human being, glib but of average intelligence at best, of character unshining and fortitude unknown, who has hit ten home runs in World Series play, and who is not, on that basis, entitled to the stature of a demi-god." In the Pitcher Ratings and Comments, James originates the idea of the Under In Section IV (Essays and Articles), James writes about Project Scoresheet, the precursor to all the situational stats that are now recorded. PROJECT SCORESHEET is an attempt to build a network of fans to collect those scoresheets, and to construct the necessary administrative framework to get the scoresheets to the public. I'm asking for your help. Next up: 1985 Baseball Abstract [Additional reader comments and retorts at Baseball Primer.] |
Comments
I found the following quote interesting:
**I am very leery of “great statistics,” of statistics which consider everything and provide the once and final answer to great baseball questions, questions like “Who was the greatest player ever?” or “Who should have won the MVP award?” or “Who really belongs in the Hall of Fame?” or even, “Who is better, Dawson or Murphy?” It is my considered opinion that we have no business answering those questions by formula.**
Especially since, just a few years later, he uses these types of metrics to assess several awards (RoY is one I recall), and several years after that, writes entire books based on those types of metrics (Win Shares, Historical Baseball Abstract).
Posted by: Nick at November 1, 2004 9:13 PM
Thank you for doing this. I wasn't even born yet when these books were published. The history of Bill James is fascinating.
Posted by: Ryan at November 2, 2004 1:23 AM
This was my first abstract, at age 14. I still love it.
Posted by: Murray at November 2, 2004 8:28 AM
If ever "forest for the trees" were applicable, it was yesterday as the managers and coaches voted Jeter/Boone as the AL middle infield Gold Glovers.
Great stuff, Rich.
Posted by: Sully at November 3, 2004 8:53 AM