The Red Sox' Stat Man And The Numbers Game

Bill James Tells 60 Minutes Mets' David Wright Would Be A Top Pick On His Dream Team

(CBS)  In 1977, the night watchman became so confident of his theories that he published them. The "Bill James Baseball Abstract" was born; it was 68 pages, mimeographed and stapled, and there was even an advertising campaign.

"Did you have a hard time convincing people of what is the basic truth of baseball?" Safer asks.

"I was a night watchman. I was working in a factory in Kansas. I didn't have a prayer of convincing people who had been in baseball for 40 years that I understood something that they didn't. Nor reasonably should I. I mean, it wouldn't have made sense for them to listen to me and they didn't," James says.

But James did gain a following that kept growing, and by 1982 a major publisher had signed him up.

"He's actually the pioneer of a whole school of thought," says NBC commentator Bob Costas, who is a true believer.

"It changed the way I looked at baseball. The idea that the most important hitting statistics are on base percentage or slugging percentage…it seems simple. But, basic baseball statistics hadn't taken that into account," Costas says.

Costas says James debunked of many of baseball’s myths, like the old belief that pitchers prevented stolen bases. James proved it was the catcher who made the difference.

Some other theories seemed unsupportable, like James' dictum that there is no such thing as a clutch hitter, or that batting order has no significance. But his numbers did show that the sacrifice bunt is rarely worth the out, and that the use of the so-called "closer" is a wasted pitching resource.

"Why does your closer only have to pitch the ninth inning?" Costas asks. "Bill has said for a long time, 'Why wouldn’t you bring in your best reliever with the tying or go ahead runs in scoring position and the best hitter for the other club coming up in the sixth inning or the seventh inning?' Maybe the game turns right there."

Costas says the key to Bill James' success is his simply expressed logic. "He writes very well. And, he’s funny," Costas says. "Bill James is a very, very smart guy. Who doesn’t just understand information, but, he’s shown people a different way of interpreting that information."

Though James' abstracts became bestsellers, and he became the "voice of God" to baseball geeks everywhere, Major League Baseball was slow to appreciate him. When James claimed that legendary manager Sparky Anderson was more lucky than talented, Sparky shot back that James was "a fat little bearded man who knows nothing about nothing."

His ideas were finally put into practice in 1997, when Billy Beane of the hapless Oakland A's used sabermetrics to fill his roster with young, underrated, cheaper players. It made the A's competitive.

In 2002, the new management of the Boston Red Sox came calling on Bill James, ready to try anything to break the 86-year-old curse. Two of the partners, Tom Werner and Larry Lucchino, proclaimed James was part of a grand design-that the team would not be "your father's Red Sox."

[owlcroft]

"[Bill James's] ideas were finally put into practice in 1997, when Billy Beane of the hapless Oakland A's used sabermetrics to fill his roster with young, underrated, cheaper players. It made the A's competitive."

Speaking as the man who taught Billy Beane what is now called "Moneyball", I am quite disconcerted by this portrayal of James as the inventor of modern baseball analysis (a description I am sure James himself would quickly correct). The earliest serious attempt at analysis was (as so many brilliant things in baseball were) the brainchild of Branch Rickey, and was the cover story of a 1950 "Life" magazine issue. Much deeper and fuller analyses came from the disgracefully under-appreciated Earnshaw Cook, whose remarkable books--"Percentage Baseball" and the later "Percentage Baseball and the Computer"--were my own entry into analysis.

I am also disconcerted by the seemingly obligatory obeisance to the "there are deeper mysteries that analysis cannot reach" baloney [euphemism alert]. Science may not yet know what dark matter and dark energy are, but that does not remove them to the world of the occult; nor, by analogy, are those aspects of baseball not yet fully sounded by analytic methods either removed to the world of crystal-ball gazers or team managers. As more than one person has asked over the years, why does no one ever discuss the wonderful "chemistry" on losing teams? Or, as Leo Durocher famously put it, "All nice guys. They'll finish last." Chemistry is Na+Cl=table salt, not a method to design winning ball clubs.

[JWhittingtonAR]

I have seen this entire news segment before. Since I am 60 years old and retired 5 years ago I am going out on a limb and say it was broadcast in the last 10 years. I have lived in St. Louis, MO; Springfield, MO; Martinsburg,WV; and Fayetteville, AR.
I watched this on 60 minutes and knew from the very beginning that I had seen this report before.

Please let me know when it was originally aired.

thanks

John

[gaddy42]

Great story, Excellent report. Thanks

[joncfrank]

i could not believe that safer did not broach the subject of steroids and how it will or will not affect the evaluation of statistics. i love bill james. used to buy his abstract every year. and nobody would have a more legit reason to comment on the steroid scandal. that is why i watched the program. instead, safer talks about the limitations of stats and the "magic" of baseball. what a load of ***. really, it was one of the most disappointing journalism performances i have ever witnessed. congratulations safer. you can now take your position next to mike wallace as 60 minutes journalists who were backed down by powerful economic interests at the moment of truth.

don''t question how smart he is... did you pioneer a field of statistics? maybe you''d appreciate the knowledge if you didn''t have so much money to throw around.

[hatchersj]

During the 60-Minute segment, the word "sabermetrics" was used, but without an acknowledgement of the organization from which it is derived from: The Society of American Baseball Research(SABR). This organization was founded in 1971 and is made up of researchers just like Bill James, the man who coined the word in honor of SABR.

[bnorton24]

vrquick, if Manny had been claimed, the sox would not have sat on the money. What they replaced him with might have been more productive. Obviously, at the time, no other team thought there was value in that contract either or he would have been claimed.

[vrquick]

How smart would James have been if any team would have claimed Manny on waivers. The Red Sox are Manny and Ortiz performing in the clutch. How''s that for anyaylsis and it took me a few seconds and cost the team nothing