James’s first proper essay was the preview to an astonishing literary career. There was but one question he left unasked, and it vibrated between his lines: if gross miscalculations of a person’s value could occur on a baseball field, before a live audience of thirty thousand, and a television audience of millions more, what did that say about the measurement of performance in other lines of work? If professional baseball players could be over- or undervalued, who couldn’t? Bad as they may have been, the statistics used to evaluate baseball players were probably far more accurate than anything used to measure the value of people who didn’t play baseball for a living.
Still, had he left off writing in 1977, James would have been dismissed as just another crank who didn’t know when to shut up about box scores. He didn’t leave off in 1977. It didn’t occur to him to be disappointed by a sale of seventy-five copies; he was encouraged! No author has ever been so energized by so little. As James’s wife, Susan McCarthy, later put it, “instead of one page of a stolen base study lying on top of a couple of pages of pitcher data in the dungeon of a Stokely Van Camp’s cardboard box for years and years, ideas and questions about issues he had been chewing on for a long time took up residence in a climate that allowed for growth and maturation.”*
An invisible subplot of baseball fanaticism is its effect on the spouses of the fanatics. “Bill hid his interest in baseball when we first started dating,” said his wife. “If I had known the extent of it, I’m not sure we’d have gotten very far.”
In 1978, James came out with a second book, and this time, before entering his discussion, he checked his modesty at the door. The book was titled 1978 Baseball Abstract: The 2nd Annual Edition of Baseball’s Most Informative and Imaginative Review. “I would like to produce here the most complete, detailed, and comprehensive picture of the game of baseball available anywhere,” he wrote, “and I would like to avoid repeating anything that has ever been written before.”
Word had spread this time: 250 people bought a copy. To an author who viewed a sale of 75 copies as encouragement, the sale of 250 was a bonanza. James’s pen was now an unstoppable force. Every winter for the next nine years he wrote with greater confidence; every spring his growing audience found relatively less space devoted to numbers and more to James’s words. The words might run on for many pages but they were typically presented as digressions from the numbers. Wishing to convey the history of his obsession with baseball, for instance, James buried it in a discussion of the year-end stats of the Kansas City Royals. Unable to supress his distaste for the rich men who bought baseball teams and spent huge sums of money on players, he left off writing about the Atlanta Braves and picked up the subject of their new owner. “Ted Turner,” he wrote, “seems never to have been tempted by moderation, by dignity or restraint. He is a man who plays hard at gentleman’s games and whines when he loses that the victor was not a gentleman. No matter how hard he flees, he will always be pursued by an Awful Commonness, and that is what makes him a winner.” (Yankees fans would soon learn that James was capable of greater contempt: “Turner is the man Steinbrenner dreams of being.”)
The Baseball Abstracts were one long, elaborate aside, and the aside raised all sorts of strange new questions: If Mike Schmidt hit against the Cubs all the time, what would he hit? Did fleet young black players, as it seemed to James, actually lose their speed later in their careers than fleet young white players? Who were the best dead hitters? Even the most obscure questions about baseball, and its history, had practical implications. To calculate what Mike Schmidt would hit if he hit only against the Chicago Cubs, you needed to understand how hitting in Wrigley Field differed from hitting in other parks. To compare white and black speedsters, you needed to find a way to measure speed on the base paths and in the field; and once you’d done that, you might begin to ask questions about the importance of foot speed. To determine the best dead hitters, you needed to build tools to evaluate them, and those tools worked just as well on the living.
That last problem preoccupied James. From his second season on, he more or less set baseball defense to one side and concentrated on baseball offense. He explained to the readers of the second Abstract that his book contained roughly forty thousand baseball statistics. A few of them had been easy for him to obtain, but “the bulk of them were compiled one by one, picked out of the box scores and laboriously sorted into groups of about 30 or so, groups with titles like ‘Double Plays turned in games started by Nino Espinosa,’ and ‘Triples hit by Larry Parrish in July.”’ He freely admitted that collecting baseball statistics was, on the face of it, a bizarre way to spend one’s time—unless one was obsessed by the baseball offense. “I am a mechanic with numbers,” he wrote to readers of the third Abstract,
tinkering with the records of baseball games to see how the machinery of the baseball offense works. I do not start with the numbers any more than a mechanic starts with a monkey wrench. I start with the game, with the things that I see there and the things that people say there. And I ask: Is it true? Can you validate it? Can you measure it? How does it fit with the rest of the machinery? And for those answers I go to the record books…. What is remarkable to me is that
