THE NEXT AMERICAN NOBELIST:

"Live" with TAE: Bill James: He is the guru who invented a whole new way for Americans to partake of the national pastime from their reading chairs. More recently he has gone to work in the major leagues to see if he can translate his baseball theories into wins on the field. Meet an American sporting icon. (Tim Rives, March/April 2004, American Enterprise)

Bill James has been called "the most influential baseball writer in the sport's history." In a sport shrouded in myth, James's success is itself the stuff of legend. Thirty years ago, while working in the boiler room of a pork and beans cannery in Lawrence, Kansas, James produced a series of self-published Baseball Abstracts, which analyzed the game and its players with wit, irreverence, and the orthodoxy-smashing use of statistics. (Using James's logic, bunting, stealing, and the use of a bullpen "closer" are sucker's plays.)

The Abstracts attracted a cult following, then major publishers, and eventually a wide readership that included, among others, future Boston Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein.

Michael Lewis's recent bestseller, Moneyball, described how the Oakland A's have used the insights of James and his fellow "sabermetricians" to outfox far wealthier teams. Last season, after years of writing his mordantly erudite fan notes, Bill James left the bleachers and joined the game as a senior baseball operations adviser for the Boston Red Sox.

Kansas historian Tim Rives interviewed Bill James at the Emerson Biggins sports bar in Lawrence, Kansas.

TAE: Just what does a so-called "sabermetrician" do?

JAMES: The human mind searches for order in everything it perceives. What a sabermetrician does is search for order and patterns--objective proof--on questions that are debated by baseball people. Sabermetrics starts with the question, "What are the characteristics of winning teams?" and then moves to "Why are these things characteristics of winning teams?"

We take an historical approach to the game. Because baseball is inherently meaningless, its history is more clear and less clouded than the history of things that are meaningful.

And we rely heavily on statistics (though no good analysis in any sport is driven solely by statistics). I've tried for 25 years to keep sabermetrics from being taken over by the bad habits of academicians--overspecialization, discussing issues that are of interest only to other academics, and discussing them in a manner which is inaccessible to anyone who hasn't been following the discussion for years. [...]

TAE: Was Babe Ruth the finest player in the history of the majors?

JAMES: Yes. Mays may have been as good, Honus Wagner may have been as good, Bonds may be as good. But Ruth had more impact.

Would anyone start Bonds over Ted Williams?

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 15, 2004 5:50 PM