Moneyball (Movie Tie-In Edition) (Movie Tie-In Editions) (10 page)

For his part, Billy Beane had never heard of Bill James. “But that was the big moment,” he said, “when I figured out that all the stuff Sandy was talking about was just derivative of Bill James.” His mind had finally found an escape hatch. It led to a green field as far away from professional baseball as you could get and still be inside the park.

Chapter Four

FIELD OF IGNORANCE

I didn’t care about the statistics in anything else. I didn’t, and don’t pay attention to statistics on the stock market, the weather, the crime rate, the gross national product, the circulation of magazines, the ebb and flow of literacy among football fans and how many people are going to starve to death before the year 2050 if I don’t start adopting them for $3.69 a month; just baseball. Now why is that? It is because baseball statistics, unlike the statistics in any other area, have acquired the powers of language.

—Bill James,
1985 Baseball Abstract

T
HERE IS A CERTAIN KIND
of writer whose motives are ultimately mysterious. The writer born into a family of writers; the writer whose work is an attempt to make sense of some private trauma; the writer who from the age of four is able and willing to stay in his room and make up stories: each of these creatures is a stereotype. What he writes may be good, but why he writes isn’t something you particularly want to hear more about. The interesting case is a writer like Bill James. He grew up in a not unhappy family in Mayetta, Kansas (population: 209), and the closest he came to an uprooting experience was the move from there down the Interstate Highway to Lawrence. There, at the University of Kansas, James studied economics and literature. He didn’t know any literary types, had no apparent role models, and was not encouraged in any way to commit his thoughts to paper. After a shaggy dog story in the U.S. Army—he was the last man from Kansas drafted to serve in Vietnam but never was sent—and a fruitless layover in graduate school, he found a job as the night-watchman in a Stokely Van Camp pork and beans factory.

It was while guarding Stokely Van Camp’s pork and beans that James stumbled seriously into putting his thoughts down on paper, in response to having things he absolutely needed to say that he was unable to convey any other way. “Every form of strength is also a form of weakness,” he once wrote. “Pretty girls tend to become insufferable because, being pretty, their faults are too much tolerated. Possessions entrap men, and wealth paralyzes them. I learned to write because I am one of those people who somehow cannot manage the common communications of smiles and gestures, but must use words to get across things that other people would never need to say.”

Even more oddly, everything James needed to say was either about baseball, or could be said only in the context of a discussion of baseball. “I’d probably be a writer if there was no such thing as baseball,” he said, “but because there is such a thing as baseball I can’t imagine writing about anything else.” He was, from time to time, aware of the absurdity of devoting an entire adult life to the search for meaning in box scores. He never seems to have resisted his instinct to do it. “Now, look,” he wrote to his readers, once he’d become an established, successful author, “both of my parents died of cancer, and I fully expect that it’s going to get me, too, in time. It would be very easy for me to say that cancer research is more important to me than baseball—but I must admit that I don’t do anything which would be consistent with such a belief. I think about cancer research a few times a month; I think about baseball virtually every waking hour of my life.”

James’s first book was self-published—photocopied and stapled together by himself—and ran just sixty-eight pages (production budget: $112.73). Its formal title was:
1977 Baseball Abstract: Featuring 18 Categories of Statistical Information That You Just Can’t Find Anywhere Else
. To sell it, James took out a single one-inch advertisement in
The Sporting News.
Seventy-five people found it alluring enough to buy a copy. Opening its pale blue cover, they found a short opening explanatory paragraph that failed to explain anything much, followed by sixteen pages of baseball statistics. Astonishingly short and abrupt paragraphs followed by pages and pages of numbers: that was James’s quixotic early approach to getting across what he had to say. Were it not for the author’s frequent assertion that it was one, there was no reason to think of the first
Baseball Abstract
as a book. (“In this next section of this book…”) And there was certainly no reason to think that the writer had the capacity to lead the reader to a radical, entirely original understanding of his subject. What little James actually wrote in his first book felt stage-frightened. The questions he posed—Do some pitchers draw bigger crowds than others? How much effect does an umpire crew have on the length of a game?—could not possibly have interested anyone but the nuttiest baseball nut and, in any case, couldn’t be answered confidently with the data James had, from a single baseball season.

It wasn’t until the end of the
1977 Baseball Abstract
that James offered his cocktail party–sized readership a glimpse of his potential. The topic that finally gets him sufficiently worked up that he devotes several entire pages to it of nothing but words is: fielding statistics. The manner in which baseball people evaluate players’ fielding performance—adding up their errors, and applauding the guy with the fewest—struck him as an outrage. “What is an error?” he asked. “It is, without exception, the only major statistic in sports which is a record of what an observer thinks
should have been accomplished.
It’s a moral judgment, really, in the peculiar quasi-morality of the locker room…. Basketball scorers count mechanical errors, but those are a record of objective facts: team A has the ball, then team B has the ball…. But the fact of a baseball error is that
no
play has been made but that the scorer thinks it should have. It is, uniquely,
a record of opinions.
”

James went on to explain that the concept of an error, like many baseball concepts, was tailored to an earlier, very different game. Errors had been invented in the late 1850s, when fielders didn’t wear gloves, the outfield went unmowed and the infield ungroomed, and the ball was bashed around until it was lopsided. In 1860, a simple pop fly was an adventure. Any ball hit more than a few feet from a fielder on leave from the Civil War was unplayable. Under those circumstances, James conceded, it might have made some kind of sense to judge a fielder by his ability to cope with balls hit right at him. But a century later the statistic was still being used, unaided by any other, when anyone with eyes could see that balls hit at big league players were a trivial detail in a bigger picture. A talent for avoiding obvious failure was no great trait in a big league baseball player; the easiest way not to make an error was to be too slow to reach the ball in the first place. After all, wrote James, “you have to do something
right
to get an error; even if the ball is hit right at you, then you were standing in the right place to begin with.”

The statistics were not merely inadequate; they lied. And the lies they told led the people who ran major league baseball teams to misjudge their players, and mismanage their games. James later reduced his complaint to a sentence: fielding statistics made sense only as numbers, not as language. Language, not numbers, is what interested him. Words, and the meaning they were designed to convey. “When the numbers acquire the significance of language,” he later wrote, “they acquire the power to do all of the things which language can do: to become fiction and drama and poetry….And it is not just baseball that these numbers, through a fractured mirror, describe. 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.” What to most people was a dull record of ephemeral events without deep meaning or lasting value was for James a safe deposit box containing life’s secrets.

Baseball was theatre. But it could not be artful unless its performances could be properly understood. The meaning of these performances depended on the clarity of the statistics that measured them; bad fielding statistics were like a fog hanging over the stage. That raised an obvious question: why would the people in charge allow professional baseball to be distorted so obviously? The answer was equally obvious: they believed they could judge a player’s performance simply by watching it. In this, James argued, they were deeply mistaken.

That was James’s most general point, buried beneath his outrage about fielding statistics: the naked eye was an inadequate tool for learning what you needed to know to evaluate baseball players and baseball games:

Think about it. One absolutely cannot tell, by watching, the difference between a .300 hitter and a .275 hitter. The difference is one hit every two weeks. It might be that a reporter, seeing every game that the team plays, could sense that difference over the course of the year if no records were kept, but I doubt it. Certainly the average fan, seeing perhaps a tenth of the team’s games, could never gauge two performances that accurately—in fact if you see both 15 games a year, there is a 40% chance that the .275 hitter will have more hits than the .300 hitter in the games that you see. The difference between a good hitter and an average hitter is simply not visible—it is a matter of record.

But the hitter is the center of attention.
We notice what he does, bend over the scorecard with his name in mind. If he hits a smash down the third base line and the third baseman makes a diving stop and throws the runner out, then we notice and applaud the third baseman. But until the smash is hit, who is watching the third baseman? If he anticipates, if he adjusts for the hitter and moves over just two steps, then the same smash is a routine backhand stop—and nobody applauds….

It was James’s first sustained attack on baseball’s conventional wisdom. He concluded it with a question:

So if we can’t tell who the good fielders are accurately from the record books, and we can’t tell accurately from watching, how can we tell?

“By counting things,” he replied. Then he went on to propose a new statistic—the “range factor,” he called it. A player’s range factor was simply the number of
successful
plays he made in the field per game. There were obvious problems with range factors, too—an outfielder on a team staffed by fly ball pitchers, for instance, had more opportunities to make successful plays than an outfielder on a team staffed by sinker ball pitchers—but the details of the thing didn’t matter. What mattered was James’s ability to light a torch in a dark chamber and throw a new light on a dusty problem. He made you think. There was something bracing about the way he did it—his passion, his humor, his intolerance of stupidity, his preference for leaving an honest mess for others to clean up rather than a tidy lie for them to admire—that inspired others to join his cause. The cause was bigger than fielding statistics. The cause was the systematic search for new baseball knowledge.

The cause wasn’t original. James was hardly the first person to notice that there was still stuff to be figured out about baseball, and that the game’s underlying rationalities might be discerned through statistical analysis. Going right back to the invention of the box score in 1845, and its subsequent improvement in 1859 by a British-born journalist named Henry Chadwick, there had been numerate analysts who saw that baseball, more than other sports, gave you meaningful things to count, and that by counting them you could determine the value of the people who played the game. But what got counted was often simply what was easiest to count, or what Henry Chadwick, whose reference point was cricket, had decided was important to count.

Chadwick was the critical figure in this history. To anyone who asked, “How could baseball statistics be so screwed up?,” Henry Chadwick was usually the beginning, and occasionally the end, of the answer. Chadwick’s stated goal in counting the events that occurred on a ball field was reform: he wanted players to be judged by their precise contributions to victory and defeat. He was as upset about the immorality he witnessed on the baseball diamond as he was about the drinking and gambling he found on the city streets—about which he also never tired of complaining. He longed to affix blame and credit for baseball plays, and to do it, he grossly oversimplified matters. Fielding errors were just one example of Chadwick’s moralistic mind at work. Another was his interpretation of the base on balls. In cricket there was no such thing as a walk: Chadwick had to get his mind around a new idea. The tool was ill-designed for the task: Chadwick was better at popularizing baseball statistics than he was at thinking through their meaning. He decided that walks were caused entirely by the pitcher—that the hitter had nothing to do with them. In his initial box score Chadwick recorded a walk as an error; even in the later box scores, after he had listened to, or at least heard, the obvious objections from others, Chadwick never credited the hitter. He simply removed the walk altogether from the record books. “There is but one true criterion of skill at the bat,” he wrote, “and that is the number of times bases are made on clean hits.” Enter the batting average, ever since the chief measure of a player’s offensive value.
*

The more you examined these old measurement devices, the less apt they seemed. Chadwick, with help from others, had created a system of perverse incentives for anyone who trotted out onto a baseball field. The fetish made of “runs batted in” was another good example of the general madness. RBI had come to be treated by baseball people as an individual achievement—free agents were
paid
for their reputation as RBI machines when clearly they were not. Big league players routinely swung at pitches they shouldn’t to lard their RBI count. Why did they get so much credit for this? To knock runners in, runners needed to be on base when you came to bat. There was a huge element of luck in even having the opportunity, and what wasn’t luck was, partly, the achievement of others. “The problem,” wrote James, “is that baseball statistics are not pure accomplishments of men against other men, which is what we are in the habit of seeing them as. They are accomplishments of men in combination with their circumstances.”