"THE PRICE OF BURLAP IN DES MOINES":

I got my first job when I was ten years old. Without so much as a routine interview, the fine folks at the Babe Ruth baseball park in my hometown of Jonesboro, Arkansas, hired me to be a scorekeeper. For two or three games each night during the summer, I tracked, with pencil and paper, every groundout to second base (4-3), hit by pitch (HBP), error on the shortstop (E6), wild pitch (WP), walk (BB), strikeout swinging (K), strikeout looking (ꓘ), double play (6-4-3, 4-6-3, 2-3-4, etc.), and more. I turned in my scorecards at the office at the end of each game and, in exchange for my labor, received a complimentary hot dog and a slushie of my choice. It was the best job I have ever had. It was also where I became fluent in my second language.

I had been playing baseball and collecting baseball cards for over half my life, so I already spoke baseball and read baseball, both quite well. I could look at the statistics on the back of Willie McGee's 1986 Topps® card and explain why he won the National League MVP in 1985: the .353 batting average, the .503 slugging percentage, the league-leading 216 hits. I could see his 56 stolen bases and 18 triples and know from the numbers alone that McGee ran the bases both aggressively and fast. Learning to keep score was like learning to diagram a sentence, though. Suddenly, I saw the mechanics of the working thing at rest--not just what certain numbers on the back of a baseball card meant, but how they had come to mean. And in the cyclical way that knowledge begets affection, and vice versa, I also began to see why those numbers meant so much to me.

"When the numbers acquire the significance of language," says Bill James, "they acquire the power to do all of the things which language can do: to become fiction and drama and poetry."[i] James is a fellow baseball lover and numbers nerd. Back when Willie McGee was stealing bases for the St. Louis Cardinals, James was in Kansas City trying to change how baseball people watched, played, and thought about America's favorite pastime--with numbers, yes, but more so with words. For James, the story was in the statistics, but his ambition was to make good literature. "It is not just baseball that these numbers, through a fractured mirror, describe," he says, conscious of alliteration and fearful of no lofty metaphor:

It is character. It is psychology, it is history, it is power, it is grace, glory, consistency, sacrifice, courage, it is success and failure, it is frustration and bad luck, it is ambition, it is overreaching, it is discipline. And it is victory and defeat, which is all that the idiot sub-conscious really understands.[ii]

In a 2003 profile of James in The New Yorker magazine, journalist Ben McGrath says of "the professor of baseball" that his "approach seemed distinctly American, descended from the nineteenth-century pragmatist tradition exemplified by his namesake, the philosopher William James." While this may be true of James's statistical analysis, his prose descends not from William James, but from the lineage of a different, and distinctly not pragmatic, titan of American letters. Bill James on baseball is Herman Melville on whaling.

II.

The Anatomy of America's Game

Flip through any of James's annual Baseball Abstracts from the Reagan years and the comparison I just made will not sound so grandiose. Tables of obscure batting and fielding statistics accompanied by illustrations of the complex mathematical formulas used to create them are interspersed with lengthy essays on, and rankings of, players, managers, and teams, all of it connected and dissected and opined on by a first-person narrator, Bill, an unabashed Kansas City Royals fan.

For example, in the 1983 Abstract, in the section on third basemen, he ranks George Brett, a future Hall of Famer, as the fourth-best third sacker in baseball due to a slump in his batting statistics over the two seasons prior. James chalks this up, in part, to Brett's seeing more curve balls from pitchers and not being able to hit them, but also, curiously, to Brett's bachelorhood, and to the particular strain of masculine entitlement the hot-tempered Brett inherited from his father and brothers, which his former manager, Whitey Herzog, nurtured, but which his current manager, Dick Howser, does not. "[Brett] wants the Royals to tell him that they love him," James says, "and instead they tell him it's a business. Sure, he's a spoiled kid, but we're not all too adult to sympathize with those feelings, are we?"[iii]

This is not an essay about Bill James, though. At least, it is not an essay about Bill James any more than Moby-Dick is a book about whales. But in the introduction to that 1983 Abstract, wherein James describes the "eccentricity" of his own style, both personal and literary, you will forgive me for seeing, through a fractured mirror, not baseball statistics but cetology, and not James in Kansas City, but Ishmael in New Bedford, or, better yet, at sea:

The subject of the book is sabermetrics; SABR for the Society for American Baseball Research, Metrics for measurement, with an extra "e" thrown in so you can pronounce it. Most of the time, anyway; sometimes I take off on a tangent and start writing about Princess Margaret, call-in shows or shark jokes. But what the hell, sportswriters will stop writing about baseball at the drop of a hat and start writing about economics, drugs or lawsuits, and they don't feel bad about it. Indeed, what is eccentric about my writing about baseball is that I write so much about baseball and sometimes will examine the tiniest parts of the game in exhaustive detail without seeming to feel any compulsion to leave the subject and start writing about leadership or character or personality conflicts or go do an interview somewhere.

Except, like Melville, leadership and character and personality conflicts are exactly what Bill James is writing about when he debates the value of advanced fielding metrics for managerial decisions. Also like Melville, James knows it, and is cunning enough to play coy.

Tweet   @brothersjudd