James’s readers were hard to classify because he was hard to classify. The sheer quantity of brain power that hurled itself voluntarily and quixotically into the search for new baseball knowledge was either exhilarating or depressing, depending on how you felt about baseball. The same intellectual resources might have cured the common cold, or put a man on Pluto; instead, it was used to divine the logic hidden inside a baseball game, and create whole new ways of second-guessing the manager.
Four years into his experiment James was still self-publishing his Baseball Abstract but he was overwhelmed by reader mail. What began as an internal monologue became, first, a discussion among dozens of resourceful people, and then, finally, a series of arguments in which fools were not tolerated. (Most witheringly not by James: “Is baseball really 75% pitching? James J. Skipper attempted to answer this question in the 1980 Baseball Research Journal, by the ingenious method of asking everybody in sight what percentage of baseball was pitching, totaling up their answers, and dividing by the number of people in sight….”) By 1981, in response to a pile of letters asking him what he thought about a new baseball offense model created by the sports journalist Thomas Boswell, James was able and willing to write that “the world needs another offensive rating system like Custer needed more Indians (or, for that matter, like the Indians needed another Custer)…. What we really need is for the amateurs to clear the floor.” There was now such a thing as intellectually rigorous baseball analysts. James had given the field of study its name: sabermetrics.*
The name derives from SABR, the acronym of the Society for American Baseball Research. In 2002, the society had about seven thousand members.
The swelling crowd of disciples and correspondents made James’s movement more potent in a couple of ways. One was that it now had a form of peer review: by the early 1980s all the statistical work was being vetted by people, unlike James, who had a deep interest in, and understanding of, statistical theory. Baseball studies, previously an eccentric hobby, became formalized along the lines of an academic discipline. In one way it was an even more effective instrument of progress: all these exquisitely trained, brilliantly successful scientists and mathematicians were working for love, not money. And for a certain kind of hyperkinetic analytical, usually male mind there was no greater pleasure than searching for new truths about baseball. “Baseball is a soap opera that lends itself to probabilistic thinking,” is how Dick Cramer described the pleasure.
The other advantage was that the growing army of baseball analysts was willing and able to generate new baseball data. James was forever moaning about the paucity of the information kept by major league baseball teams. Early in one of his Baseball Abstracts he had explained to his readers that “the answers that I arrive at—and thus the methods I have chosen—are never wholly satisfactory, almost never wholly disappointing. The most consistent problems that I have arise from the limitations on my information sources. All I have is the box scores.” The reason he couldn’t get more than the box scores is that the company that kept the score sheets for Major League Baseball, the Elias Sports Bureau, was perfectly unhelpful when James asked it for access to them. “The problem with the Elias Bureau,” he wrote, “is that the Elias Bureau never turns loose of a statistic unless they get a dollar for it. Their overarching concern in life is to get every dollar they can from you and give you as little as possible in return for it—like a lot of other businesses, I suppose, only with a more naked display of greed than is really usual.”
James was shocked by the indifference of baseball insiders to the fans who took more than an ordinary interest. Major League Baseball had no sense of the fans as customers, and so hadn’t the first clue of what the customer wanted. The customer wanted stats and Major League Baseball did its best not to give them to him. The people inside Major League Baseball were, if anything, hostile to the people outside Major League Baseball who wished to study the game. That struck James, who by now had perfected the art of sounding like a sane man in an insane world, as mad. “The entire basis of professional sports is the public’s interest in what is going on,” he wrote. “To deny the public access to information that it cares about is the logical equivalent of locking the stadiums and playing the games in private so that no one will find out what is happening.”
In 1984, James wrote to what was now a rapidly expanding crowd of baseball nuts and proposed a radical idea: Take the accumulation of baseball statistics out of the hands of baseball insiders. Build an organization of hundreds of volunteer scorekeepers who would collect the stuff you needed to know to reduce baseball to a science. “What I propose here, so far as I know for the first time in a century, is to start over…. I am proposing to re-build the box score, not around the old one, but around the tool from which the box score is assembled: the score sheet.” He then explained that much of the data collected by professional baseball teams—say, how right-handed hitters fared against left-handed pitching—wasn’t available to the public. Worse, baseball teams didn’t have the sense to know what to collect, and so an awful lot of critical data simply went unrecorded: how batters fared in different counts and different game situations, who was pitching when a base was stolen, how different outfielders affected the audacity of runners on the base paths, where hits landed and how hard they were hit, how many pitches a pitcher threw in a game. The lack of critical data meant that “we as analysts of the game are
