Balls: the joy of watching ideas win - Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game - Book Review

Reason, Dec, 2003 by Matt Welch

Being introduced to James' contrarian and original writing--not unlike encountering Moneyball for the first time can permanently alter one's brain chemistry. Lewis himself experienced the phenomenon after Billy Beane lent him his old Abstracts. "What stunned me," the author told the stat geek site BaseballPrimer.com, "was the literary eloquence of Bill James. I was absolutely astonished.... I could not believe that I didn't know who this man was. I was just astonished by it. It was a combination of the clarity of the thought and the joy of the way it's expressed. It just seemed totally original and fresh to Inc."

James, a night watchman at a pork and beans factory, sold 75 of his first Abstract, a stapled, mimeographed sheet full of new statistical curios: average length of games by individual umpire, attendance by pitcher, etc. His figures were flavored with the occasional verbal dart. In the 1982 Abstract, for instance, he had this to say about Dave Parker: "There is no doubt about it: It is hard to play baseball well when you're fat." Or on Duane Kuiper, in the same edition: "It's absolutely incredible that a player this bad could be given 3000 at bats in the major leagues."

Jabs aside, James' formulas and stubbornly sensible observations began seeping into the consciousness of the game, especially after the book was picked up by Ballantine and became an annual bestseller. The object of offense was scoring runs while preventing outs, and by far the two most important factors in scoring runs were the ability to get on base (measure by on-base percentage) and the ability to advance runners (slugging percentage). Batting average, just a component of both, was vastly overrated when compared to drawing walks and hitting for power; 1970s catcher Gene Tenace, with his low batting average and high walk numbers, was never considered the offensive equivalent of his singles-hitting counterpart Manny Sanguillen, when in fact Tenace was his run-producing superior by a wide margin. The effects of individual ballparks distorted statistics more than most people realized. Hitters in Fenway Park and Wrigley Field were overrated, as were pitchers in the Astrodome and Dodger Stadium. Positions on defense were aligned on an invisible spectrum, with the more challenging middle-infield spots on the left (where offense wasn't so important), first basemen and designated hitters on the right. (As James was making these observations, teams were still employing singles-hitting first basemen with mediocre batting averages; that no longer happens.) The average peak performance of hitters was at age 27, not 30 as was once commonly thought.

On and on it went--and still goes: James' 2002 hook Win Shares may lead to brand new ways of evaluating defensive performance. James always had a perversely attractive tough-love approach to his readers--and to his own conclusions, which he happily ripped up and denounced, year after year, as new information or thinking came to light. He railed against the inadequacy of stats gathering and helped create a grassroots organization to fill in the many blanks in the average box score. "There was something bracing about the way he did it his passion, his humor, his intolerance of stupidity, his preference for leaving an honest mess for others to clean up rather than a tidy lie for them to admire--that inspired others to join his cause," Lewis writes.