The movement to take the understanding of professional baseball away from baseball professionals, dubbed by James “Project Scoresheet,” soon combined with a small, failing business created by Dick Cramer, called STATS Inc., that was designed to do much the same thing. The goal of STATS Inc. had been, in Cramer’s words, “to set down the primary events that occurred in a baseball game as completely as possible.” Back in 1980, STATS Inc. had set out to sell this sort of information to baseball teams, but the teams wanted nothing to do with it. Cramer pressed on: to big league baseball games, beginning in the spring of 1981 with an exhibition game between the Chicago Cubs and the Oakland A’s (future A’s scout Matt Keough got the win), the company sent its own scorekeepers. Along with all the usual data, these poorly paid people recorded play-by-play information about the games that had never before been systematically collected: the pitch count at the end of at bats, pitch types and locations, the direction and distance of batted balls. They broke the field down into twenty-six wedges radiating out from home plate. A fly ball’s distance was judged to be where it landed; a ground ball’s, where it was picked up. If a player singled and advanced to second on an error by the right fielder, the play was recorded as two separate events. All of this was new and, to the movement analysts, essential if you wanted to get to the guts of the game.
The people who were paid to manage professional teams failed to see the point. They hadn’t even bothered to compile the information they needed to analyze their actions intelligently. Presented with new information by STATS Inc., they showed little interest in it, even when it was offered to them gratis. The CEO of STATS Inc., John Dewan, said that “You had general managers and managers who had played the game. How could someone who all they knew is computers tell them anything that would make them more successful? I remember calling the White Sox, almost as a matter of courtesy, and telling them ‘Hey, when Frank Thomas plays first base, he hits seventy points better than when he DH’s.’ Nobody cared to know it.” Every eighteen months STATS Inc. would hire another bright, well-educated young man who simply could not believe that major league baseball teams did not want to know things that might help them win games. He would then proceed to hurl himself into the business of selling STATS Inc. to baseball teams. He always quit, disillusioned. “The people who run baseball are surrounded by people trying to give them advice,” said James. “So they’ve built very effective walls to keep out anything.”
It wasn’t as simple as the unease of jocks in the presence of nerds. Professional baseball was happy to have intellectuals hanging around the clubhouse and the commissioner’s office and the GM’s suite. Well, perhaps not happy, but not disturbed either, so long as the intellectuals had no practical consequences for how baseball was played, and by whom. Baseball offered a comfortable seat to the polysyllabic wonders who quoted dead authors and blathered on about the poetry of motion. These people dignified the game, like a bow tie. They were harmless. What was threatening was cold, hard intelligence.
STATS Inc. founder Dick Cramer told a story with the flavor of the deeper problem. In the early days, through fluky circumstances, Cramer had sold his data collection and analysis service to the Houston Astros. The Astros’ GM, Al Rosen, wanted to know how the team would be affected if the Astrodome’s fences were moved in. Would the team, as currently composed, do better or worse in a smaller, more hitter-friendly park? Cramer ran the numbers-showing the relative propensity of the Astros versus their opponents to hit long pop flies—and told Rosen, “Sorry, if you do that, you lose more games.” Instead of deciding not to move the fences in, Rosen decided that the information could never be made public. “All of a sudden it is classified information,” said Cramer, “It was ‘We can’t tell anyone! My God, we can’t let this information get out! Imagine the effect on our pitchers!’” They didn’t want the information to inform the decision. They’d already made the decision. (They believed home runs sold tickets.) They wanted the information, in some sense, to avoid having to deal with its implications.
In 1985, STATS Inc. gave up trying to sell their superior data to teams and began to sell it to fans. Their timing could not have been better: the baseball fan was changing in a way that made him a natural customer of STATS Inc. A new kind of fan, with a quasipractical interest in baseball statistics, had been invented. In 1980 a group of friends, led by Sports Illustrated writer Dan Okrent, met at La Rotisserie Française, a restaurant in Manhattan, and created what became known, to the confusion of a nation, as Rotisserie Baseball. Okrent can plausibly be said to have “discovered” Bill James. Okrent was one of those seventy-five people who, in 1977, ran across the one-inch ad in The Sporting News James took out and sent off his check to Lawrence, Kansas. Back came an unpromising mimeograph. Then he read it. “I was absolutely dumbstruck,” he said. “I couldn’t believe that (a) this guy existed and (b) he hadn’t been discovered.”
Okrent flew to Lawrence to make sure James indeed existed, then wrote a piece about him for Sports Illustrated. It was killed: James’s arrival on the national sporting scene was delayed by a year, after the Sports Illustrated fact-checker spiked the piece. “She went through it line by line,” recalled Okrent, “saying, ‘Everyone knows this isn’t true. Everyone knows that Nolan Ryan attracted a bigger crowd when he pitched, that Gene Tenace was a bad hitter, that…’” Conventional opinions about
