Following baseball in the abstract and far beyond

Sporting News, The, July 7, 1997 by Michael MacCambridge

On a mild evening, September 11, 1979, the Twins defeated the Royals, 3-1, in front of 21,253 fans in Kansas City. Sitting well down the third base line that night were two particularly rapt fans, meeting for the first time. Bill James and Dan Okrent were just two more faces in the crowd, noticeable only for the oversized cardboard scorecard that Okrent was using to keep a pitch-by-pitch record of the unexceptional game. About the fifth inning, they moved down for a better seat, and James still remembers what happened next. "After we moved out of one set of seats, I looked back and a couple of guys were sitting in them. Then we moved farther down a couple of innings later, and when I looked back again, the same two guys were sitting in the seats we'd just left."

It wouldn't end that night; baseball fans have been following James and Okrent ever since.

It's no secret that much of the timeless romance of baseball has disappeared in the past generation. Today's teams redesign their uniforms every homestand, the players have become as aloof as cats after dinner and tradition is having the league use Eddie Gaedel's strike zone. Between innings, stadium loudspeakers cycle through the 14 most overplayed rock songs of all time, while furry, disfigured mascots strafe the stands with souvenir ordnance. In sum, it does not exactly evoke gauzy visions of pastoral summer reveries.

And yet, despite all this, the experience of watching a game, of thinking along with managers, of understanding the elemental matchups between pitchers and hitters, has never been richer. Baseball's real revolution in the past two decades has occurred not on the field but away from it, in the stands and in front of television sets, where serious fans are armed with substantially more information and insight than ever before. When James and Okrent first met in 1979, the public had little access to lefthander-righthander breakdowns for pitchers or hitters, or ways to tell whether Reggie Jackson really hit better than anyone else in the clutch. And even home-road statistics weren't always readily available. There was no systematic way to challenge the generations of received wisdom passed down in The Book of Baseball.

Today, all that has changed. James has emerged as the most influential baseball writer of the past generation, bringing sabermetrics--"the search for objective knowledge about baseball"--to the masses, and overturning several generations of baseball wisdom in the process. His authority today is so pervasive that Athletics president and general manager Sandy Alderson describes himself as a "James disciple," and celebrated baseball fan and Men at Work author George Will observes, "It's one of those things: When was the world without Bill James?"

Meanwhile, James' friend and advocate Dan Okrent--editor of The Ultimate Baseball Book, author of Nine Innings and ubiquitous guy-in-the-red-sweater in Ken Burns' documentary Baseball--is best known for his role as the diamond's Dr. Frankenstein. Okrent created Rotisserie Baseball, and in so doing unleashed a voracious monster that is the single parent of the sprawling "fantasy" sports industry, a presence that has become as much a part of the contemporary sports landscape as the Nike swoosh or the SportsCenter theme.

The changes that James and Okrent helped bring about--in the way baseball is watched, followed, covered and reported--have led to the dominant irony of baseball in the '90s: Even as the owners and players are more distant, fans are closer to the game than ever before.

It has been 20 years now since Bill James, then working as a night watchman at the Stokely Van Camp plant in Lawrence, Kan., took out a tiny ad in The Sporting News to announce the release of his self-published first edition of The Baseball Abstract. It read:

The 1977 Baseball Abstract Contains 18 Statistical Categories You Can't Find Anywhere Else, And a New TABLE BASEBALL GAME $2.50 plus 50 [cts.] postage and handling Box 2150 Lawrence, KS 66044

James' subsequent success has become part of baseball's literary lore, but it didn't come suddenly. The original Abstract consisted of 68 mimeographed pages, sold 70 copies and left its author in a funk. He decided to publish another Abstract in 1978 only because he was so disappointed with the quality of the first edition. "The second one was small-time compared to what I do now," he says. "But at the time, it was a job on top of my job, and I wasn't making any money at it, and in November of 1978, I was ready to say, `All right, I just can't do this again.' that's when Dan Okrent's letter arrived."

Okrent, a lifelong Tigers fan, habitual Strat-O-Matic player and ardent browser of the back-pages ads in TSN, was by then a veteran of the book-publishing industry and hard at work editing his dream project, The Ultimate Baseball Book. Earlier that year, he had joined the small but fiercely loyal group of Abstract readers who were galvanized (a) by the rigor with which James used statistical tools to re-examine--and often demolish--broad areas of baseball's conventional wisdom and (b) by his wry, folksy writing style ("Two or three times every week," he would write later, "you see Felix Jose wandering around the basepaths like a squirrel on the highway, with no regard to where the baseball is.") Like dozens of other Abstract readers, Okrent wrote to James to commend him on his work. But he didn't stop there; he also began championing the book to his circle of friends in the publishing business, earning James his first major national exposure, an assignment to write a baseball preview for Esquire in 1979.