Following baseball in the abstract and far beyond

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

After giving up the Abstract, James quickly extricated himself from what he freely admits was a state of depression. "Having children is the best therapy there is," says James, who now has three, with his wife, Susan McCarthy. "You don't have time to sit around obsessing."

In the past decade, his influence has only grown. Many of the statistical tools he first introduced--the runs-created formula as a yardstick of offensive performance, range factors as a measurement of fielding efficiency--have worked their way into common baseball discourse. James now writes about baseball primarily from a historical perspective, and his 1994 book, The Politics of Glory, became the table-setter for all subsequent arguments about who does and doesn't belong in baseball's Hall of Fame. His newest book, The Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers: From 1870 to Today, was published in May. In it he argues that Bobby Cox "is closing in on the distinction of being the greatest manager of all time." His reasoning: the performances of Cox's teams compared with the expected performances of those teams, plus the Atlanta manager's "uncanny ability," as James describes it, to keep his front-line pitchers healthy and Productive.

Today, James seems more at ease with the burden of being baseball's most-respected thinker. He just bought a new office in Lawrence, where he spends his days working on the second edition of his mammoth Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, due out next year. At 47, he has moved easily into middle age and, when he smiles, his bearded visage can bear a disconcerting resemblance to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. One thing hasn't changed: James, like millions of other baseball fans, remains captivated by Okrent's game.

Dan Okrent's invention was the result of a restless intelligence at work in the heart of the Hot Stove season. In the winter of 1980, he was working part-time as a consultant for the book-publishing wing of Texas Monthly magazine and commuting monthly from his home in Worthington, Mass., to the magazine's offices in Austin. On his regular flight from Hartford to Austin that winter, Okrent first sketched out the complex rules for what would become Rotisserie Baseball.

There had been rudimentary games based on similar ideas before, like the sportswriters' popular pastime called The .300 Game, or the runs-scored pool that was a longtime staple of New York tabloids. But no one had ever taken the concept to the extreme levels that Okrent did. His rules dictated a player auction and a salary cap for all teams, and it calculated totals in eight categories rather than one or two. Although countless baseball strategy games put the participant in the spikes of the manager, Okrent's game recast the fans as autocratic owners. "There was a huge amount of envy involved," he says now. "I felt, `Damn it, why do they get to own baseball teams?' they don't know anymore than we do. They just happen to be rich because they inherited it or they fell into something. We could do it, too and we could do it just as well."