{"id":6393,"date":"2010-01-06T07:01:14","date_gmt":"2010-01-06T07:01:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/?p=6393"},"modified":"2017-05-06T20:40:43","modified_gmt":"2017-05-06T19:40:43","slug":"book-review-the-new-bill-james-historical-baseball-abstract","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/?p=6393","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract"},"content":{"rendered":"

The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract by Bill James (Free Press, 2003), 1008 pages<\/strong><\/p>\n

The history of baseball can be both fascinating and bewildering to British fans.\u00c2\u00a0 Where do you start?\u00c2\u00a0 You often hear and read of great players and teams, but it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not easy to piece them all together, particularly in trying to\u00c2\u00a0compare players from different eras.<\/p>\n

There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a natural desire to delve into the numerous stories and to improve your knowledge of the sport\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s history, not just because it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s interesting but also to allow you to put current players into some sort of context.\u00c2\u00a0 Who were the best players from years past and what does \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcbest\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 mean when looking at a catcher or a shortstop?<\/p>\n

Summing up the history of baseball in one book is an impossible task, but The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract comes astonishingly close to doing just that.\u00c2\u00a0 <\/p>\n

Bill James is known as the forefather of the advanced statistical analysis of baseball, a discipline often referred to as sabermetrics.\u00c2\u00a0 He started publishing his ground-breaking Baseball Abstracts in 1977 and has been challenging conventional wisdom and improving our understanding of the sport ever since.\u00c2\u00a0 James first published a Historical Baseball Abstract book in 1985 before releasing a completely revised (hence the word \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcNew\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 in the title) version in 2001, followed by a slightly updated paperback version in 2003.<\/p>\n

The latter is the version being reviewed here and it is a monumental piece of work.\u00c2\u00a0 Coming in at a shade over 1000 pages, it is an impressively weighty object filled with an immense amount of information.\u00c2\u00a0Each copy is\u00c2\u00a0likely to end up a little battered and dog-eared, but that will be due to the regularity with which\u00c2\u00a0it is\u00c2\u00a0pulled down from the shelf, rather than\u00c2\u00a0its use as a door stop or \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcwhacking\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 tool (although I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m sure it could do a good job\u00c2\u00a0as either if pressed into emergency service).<\/p>\n

The book is split into three main sections: The Game, The Players and Reference.<\/p>\n

James is\u00c2\u00a0adamant that the first section isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153railroad history of baseball \u00e2\u20ac\u201c this happened, then this happened, and then this happened\u00e2\u20ac\u009d.\u00c2\u00a0 Instead, his focus was on creating \u00e2\u20ac\u0153a history of baseball that would surround you, that would reach out to you and take your hand\u00e2\u20ac\u009d.\u00c2\u00a0 He does this by bringing together many tiny details that together don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t simply explain what happened at a given time, but \u00e2\u20ac\u0153give you a sense of what it was like to be a baseball fan\u00e2\u20ac\u009d then.<\/p>\n

These details range from strictly performance-based items such as who was the best hitter or who struck out the most batters, to more quirky matters such as uniform styles and the best\/worst looking players.\u00c2\u00a0 The latter is important to note because James\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 reputation as a \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcstats guy\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 could lead you to think that this is just a dry book full of numbers.\u00c2\u00a0 That is far from the case.<\/p>\n

James covers the sport from the 1870s to the 1990s, writing a substantial chapter on each decade and also including an excellent chapter on the Negro Leagues.\u00c2\u00a0 For each decade, he sets the scene by answering the basic questions such as how the game was played (rules, strategies etc), who the game was played by (social standing, ethnicity and nationality etc) and where the game was played (geographic location, types of ballparks etc).\u00c2\u00a0 He pools together bite-size bits of info while summing up the decade \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcIn a Box\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 and then offers a range of articles and essays expanding on the key stories, issues, questions and moments of the decade.<\/p>\n

Each chapter on its own provides an invaluable overview of the decade in question and collected together they are an excellent guide to how the game has changed over the years and evolved into the one we enjoy so much today.<\/p>\n

The first section of the book would be fascinating in itself, but it gets even better with the second section.\u00c2\u00a0 Here, James lists the top 100 players from the history of the game at every position.\u00c2\u00a0 The format of this section, indeed the underlying intention of this not being \u00e2\u20ac\u0153a railroad history\u00e2\u20ac\u009d book, means that each entry is not accompanied by a full biography of the player and a host of stats.\u00c2\u00a0 Instead they vary from a few short quotes by contemporaries to James using the entry as an opportunity to delve into a particular question.<\/p>\n

For example, the entry on Mickey Mantle (per James’ rankings, the third-best centre fielder behind Willie Mays and Ty Cobb) contains a quick study comparing him to Joe DiMaggio.\u00c2\u00a0 This approach makes for a more interesting read than a strictly biography-based approach and those details can be found easily from many\u00c2\u00a0other books and websites in any case.<\/p>\n

While the entries are useful, it is the rankings that are the important part of the project.\u00c2\u00a0 All rankings are subjective, a starting point for discussion rather than a definitive statement of fact, and these are no exception.\u00c2\u00a0 However, as you would expect, James has not simply cobbled these together on the basis of gut instinct and memory.\u00c2\u00a0 There is a considered methodology behind them, explained over 40 pages that some readers may wish to skim through or largely ignore.<\/p>\n

Two statistical inventions by James lie at the heart of this methodology: Runs Created and the Win Shares system.\u00c2\u00a0 Without going into a full explanation, they provide a new way to assess a player\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s contribution to a team\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s performance that allows for meaningful comparisons between players at different positions and from different eras.<\/p>\n

Once again, this isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t to suggest that James takes a strictly stat-based approach.\u00c2\u00a0 As he explains: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the value of baseball statistics in identifying the greatest players is not that they answer all of the questions involved, but that they provide definitive answers to some<\/em> of the questions involved, which enables us to focus on the others\u00e2\u20ac\u009d.\u00c2\u00a0 Further stats based on the Win Share system are included in the Reference section, the third main section\u00c2\u00a0of the book.<\/p>\n

The only fault that can be found with The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract is that it is not now quite as new as the name suggests.\u00c2\u00a0 The just-completed ‘2000s’ decade\u00c2\u00a0is obviously not covered in the first section and, more importantly, the player rankings only take into account performances up to the end of the 2000 season, although the 2003 paperback version includes a postscript that updates the rankings to that point.<\/p>\n

This is something to be mindful of when considering the rankings, but it doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t devalue the book in any significant way.\u00c2\u00a0 The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract is still the best book available on the history of baseball and is an essential purchase for anybody interested in the topic.<\/p>\n

Have you read \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract\u00e2\u20ac\u009d? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below. Can you recommend any other similar books? If so, let us know.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A review of the best book available on the history of baseball in the States<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[76,553],"class_list":["post-6393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-baseball-books","tag-book-reviews","tag-mlb-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6393"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6393\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19808,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6393\/revisions\/19808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}