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03/16/2004 8:00 AM ET
Stats the name of the game
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By Ian Browne / MLB.com |
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| The Red Sox hired Bill James to be the senior baseball operations advisor. (Bizuayehu Tesfaye/AP)
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FORT MYERS, Fla. -- The unquestioned pioneer of the statistical evolution that has at last taken hold in Major League Baseball the last few years, Bill James didn't get involved in all of this because of an obsession with numbers.
Instead, James, an avid baseball fan for the better part of his life, had -- and still has -- an undying thirst for answering questions about the game.
The statistics, you see, are an answer to those questions. James gets paid to answer those questions by the Boston Red Sox, the team he has been senior baseball operations advisor for since November 2002.
"How does anything start? Everything starts with a question and you want to know what the answer to it is and you try to figure out what the answer to it is," said James. "All of my work is entirely driven by questions. The statistics are simply a pathway between the question and the answer."
So the quest for answers continues for James and his now sizable throng of Sabermetrician followers.
Sabermetrics (the effort to replace conjecture and speculation about issues of concern to baseball fans) is just one of the many concepts James has created throughout his decades of getting paid to thoroughly dissect the roots of the game he loves so much. Among the other James innovations were runs created (estimated runs each player creates for his team) and win shares (estimate of player's contribution to his team's win total).
How was James so far ahead of the curve in the quest for statistical analysis in baseball?
Perhaps because assumptions never existed in his world while he watched a baseball game. He saw a lot of the stats that everyone else saw. But he took it several steps further to see if the obvious numbers were actually a barometer of how valuable the player was.
"People always have made decisions based on baseball stats to a large extent. My point is more that if you're going to make the decisions based on stats, to the extent that you're going to make decisions based on the stats, you're better off making correct ones than incorrect ones," said James. "There are some guys who hit .240 who are actually good players anyway. There are actually some guys who hit .300 who don't help you win anyway. To the extent that you can see that and get a correct read on what the player is doing rather than an incorrect one, you're better off."
Because of his analytical prowess and statistical genius, James has been able to author more than 30 baseball books over the last three decades, most notably the annual Baseball Abstract that served as a bible for die-hard fans in the 1980s.
Before he started making his living analyzing baseball, James worked in several unglamorous odd jobs, including fast food restaurants, night watchman, convenience store clerk and forklift driver. One of his first career goals was to be an economics teacher.
But his obsession for baseball drained the ambition he had for any other kind of work.
"I was never a particularly good student," said James. "I suppose I was capable of being a good student -- most everybody is -- but when I studied Micro Economics, for example, I would take what I learned there and figure out how to apply it to baseball. I would spend five minutes mastering the concept, 50 hours figuring out how it might apply to baseball. This was a drain on my potential to become an Economics professor. Even when I was in high school, teachers would tell me to put away those box scores and do my homework. Once I focused on writing about baseball, all of that energy was working for me, rather than working against me."
The Lawrence, Kan., native started his baseball work quietly.
Through thorough examination, he learned that left-handed pitchers were far tougher to steal on than righties.
Back when there was no such thing as righty-lefty batter splits, James had to find ways of digging up the data on his own.
The first Baseball Abstract was published in 1977, it's just that barely anyone saw it.
"It was intended to be a spring annual but it was so crudely published in the first few years, it was just staple-bound," said James. "I never distributed it to friends. In fact, I never told my friends I was doing it at all. I placed little ads in The Sporting News and other places, it just took a while to build a market for it. The first year, I sold like 70 copies."
The turnaround came in 1981, when Sports Illustrated published an article about the research being done by James. From there, things took off. And the rest, as they say, is history.
In the early years, James sometimes felt as if he was writing in a vacuum. For all the substantial things he was learning, he wondered why the powers-that-be in Major League Baseball didn't seem to be listening.
"When you first discover something like this (that lefty pitchers are harder to steal on than righties) and you print it, you first think, or at least I did, that the whole world is going to be aware of this now and that people will stop saying that left-handed pitchers are easier to run on than right-handers," said James.
"You quickly discover that nobody is paying that much attention, and that you can demonstrate that proposition A is clearly false and people will continue to assert proposition A for the next 100 years anyway. So repeating that experience a few hundred times, by the early 1980s, I had come to think of that as just the way the world was and perhaps was not the first person to realize that you actually do change opinions, it just takes a long time."
Indeed it has been a long time coming, but some of James' beliefs seem to become more mainstream each year.
Working for one of the most prestigious organizations in sports has created an interesting dynamic for James.
"Working with the Red Sox gives me a new perspective on every problem," said James. "It's more like trying to figure out if the things I thought from the outside really work from the inside. Working with Red Sox forces me to address different questions and thus enables me to see a lot of things that I didn't see before."
What stats does James first look at when he evaluates players?
"Well, I think the more critical question is what do you look at second. I think the things I look at first are the same things everybody else does. Won-loss record and ERA for a pitcher and home runs, RBIs and batting average for a batter," said James. "Those are the first things you see and the first things you look at. The real question is what do you look at second."
Fair enough. So what does James look at second when he looks at hitters?
"I look at the gap between batting average and on-base percentage," said James. "One thing I like to do is add up the runs scored and the RBI and compare it to the hits. If the guy's got 150 hits and 110 runs scored-plus RBIs, he's probably not helping you. If he has 150 hits and 180 runs scored-plus RBIs, he almost certainly is helping you, so that's another way to look at it."
And pitchers?
"The second thing I look at for pitchers is strikeout-to-walk ratios," said James. "It's the most individual of the things a pitcher does. A good team can save a bad pitcher in almost everything but strikeouts and walks. A bad team or a bad team performance can condemn a good pitcher in almost every other stat. The strikeout-to-walk ratio, you're on your own. For that reason, it's one of the most stable indicators of a pitcher's real ability."
The process of evaluating a player's defensive value isn't quite so conventional.
"It's very hard," said James. "People have worked harder at evaluating fielders in the last 20 years, far more work has been put into that than has been put into hitters and pitchers. The reason that's true is that fielding stats when the game was originally set up and evolved in the 1870s and 80s were badly designed and they haven't moved at all. The fielding stats that are official now are exactly the same as they were in 1880, no change at all. Pitching stats have changed, saves have been added, holds, save opportunities. Unearned runs. The pitching stats have evolved, the batting stats have evolved, the fielding stats haven't evolved at all."
But James has his own ways of combating that dilemma.
"It's frustrating, but it's something to do. You can always work on that problem because it never goes away," said James. "The first thing you have to do is establish innings. You have to establish how many innings the guy has played in the field, not how many games. How meaningful would ERAs be if Derek Lowe and Alan Embree were both measured by runs allowed per game. The second thing you do is establish the ground ball tendency of the team, which is very, very closely related to the team's assist total. You have to look at assists not as a vacuum but as a percentage of the team total. If you sort of pick your way through the minefield carefully in that way, you can come up with a pretty good estimate of a guy's fielding contribution given traditional fielding stats."
Rest assured that James has a lot of years of dissection still in him. He doesn't ever foresee a time when he has this complex game figured out.
"There's a universe of unknowns and a little cigar box of information," James said. "We're so far away from reaching the end of the task that it's laughable. We don't know anything, really."
Ian Browne is a reporter for MLB.com. This story was not subject to the approval of Major League Baseball or its clubs.
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