Bill James Interview

[EVIL~! alkeiper 0]

http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleID.179...icle_detail.asp

 

"Live" with TAE

Bill James

 

He is the guru who invented a whole new way for Americans to partake of the national pastime from their reading chairs.  More recently he has gone to work in the major leagues to see if he can translate his baseball theories into wins on the field. Meet an American sporting icon.

 

 

 

Bill James has been called "the most influential baseball writer in the sport's history." In a sport shrouded in myth, James's success is itself the stuff of legend. Thirty years ago, while working in the boiler room of a pork and beans cannery in Lawrence, Kansas, James produced a series of self-published Baseball Abstracts, which analyzed the game and its players with wit, irreverence, and the orthodoxy-smashing use of statistics. (Using James's logic, bunting, stealing, and the use of a bullpen "closer" are sucker's plays.)

 

 

 

The Abstracts attracted a cult following, then major publishers, and eventually a wide readership that included, among others, future Boston Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein.

 

 

 

Michael Lewis's recent bestseller, Moneyball, described how the Oakland A's have used the insights of James and his fellow "sabermetricians" to outfox far wealthier teams. Last season, after years of writing his mordantly erudite fan notes, Bill James left the bleachers and joined the game as a senior baseball operations adviser for the Boston Red Sox.

 

 

 

Kansas historian Tim Rives interviewed Bill James at the Emerson Biggins sports bar in Lawrence, Kansas.

 

 

 

TAE: Just what does a so-called "sabermetrician" do?

 

 

 

JAMES: The human mind searches for order in everything it perceives. What a sabermetrician does is search for order and patterns--objective proof--on questions that are debated by baseball people. Sabermetrics starts with the question, "What are the characteristics of winning teams?" and then moves to "Why are these things characteristics of winning teams?"

 

 

 

We take an historical approach to the game. Because baseball is inherently meaningless, its history is more clear and less clouded than the history of things that are meaningful.

 

 

 

And we rely heavily on statistics (though no good analysis in any sport is driven solely by statistics). I've tried for 25 years to keep sabermetrics from being taken over by the bad habits of academicians--overspecialization, discussing issues that are of interest only to other academics, and discussing them in a manner which is inaccessible to anyone who hasn't been following the discussion for years.

 

 

 

TAE: Was there a specific Eureka! moment for you when you were working at the bean plant and analyzing patterns in baseball on the side when you realized you had something that could become your vocation?

 

 

 

JAMES: Well, there was a period when all of my friends were getting married and I was going to weddings and talking to people. And it seemed like at every wedding I would run into somebody who was fascinated by my baseball analysis. Most of the world was trying to tell me I would never earn my keep by doing this. But I began to think, "If these people are so interested in what I'm doing, how can it not be possible to make a living at it?"

 

 

 

TAE: Michael Lewis's Moneyball cast sabermetricians as heroes and the old-school baseball men as hidebound dunces. Was the book widely read by people in major league baseball? Did it cause you--as one of its heroes--any discomfort?

 

 

 

JAMES: None whatsoever. I think it may have caused a few awkward moments for Billy Beane [the Oakland A's general manager], but hell, Billy can handle that. The book was very kind to me, and I appreciate that. I didn't read the book as portraying old-school baseball men as hidebound dunces. Nobody who has talked to me about it was offended.

 

 

 

TAE: You write, "The most important discovery I've made is the fact that you can predict a player's major league batting performance based on his minor league record."

 

 

 

JAMES: But you can't sit back and wait, or the system doesn't work well. What happens is that by the time guys have proven they can play in the minors, they're too old to be really valuable in the majors. So you have to keep ahead of the curve. That's why the guys who are the best players in the majors often didn't succeed brilliantly in the minors--because they weren't given time to.

 

 

 

TAE: Is Barry Bonds the best player of our era?

 

 

 

JAMES: By far.

 

 

 

TAE: Was Babe Ruth the finest player in the history of the majors?

 

 

 

JAMES: Yes. Mays may have been as good, Honus Wagner may have been as good, Bonds may be as good. But Ruth had more impact.

 

 

 

TAE: You write, "There's a good argument that Roger Clemens is the greatest pitcher who ever lived." What can we expect now that he's in the National League?

 

 

 

JAMES: The National League and the American League draw talent from the same pools. Players go back and forth from one to the other. They use the same umpires, sometimes the same fields. Many of the differences people see as existing between the two leagues are totally the product of the imagination. The only real difference is that Clemens will now get two easy strikeouts a game from facing the pitcher. His strikeout rate will go up. And I suspect he himself will turn out to be a pretty decent hitter, despite his age.

 

 

 

TAE: What is it that kills old pitchers? Is it injuries?

 

 

 

JAMES: It's attrition, or injuries to put it another way. If you start with a pool of a thousand 25-year-old pitchers, and every year 15 percent of them get hurt, then eventually, sometime in their forties, you're going to reach a point where there just aren't any more of them left. That's more or less what happens in baseball. It's not that the injury rates accelerate as pitchers age, it's just that eventually there aren't any of them left.

 

 

 

TAE: Do you think the modern truncated pitching motion has hurt pitchers?

 

 

 

JAMES: I don't think it's helped. I think the modern, efficient motion has more to do with orthodoxy than with wisdom. But I don't know that it's causing injuries.

 

 

 

TAE: More American kids now play soccer than baseball. And on a Sunday afternoon in the middle of June you can, as I found last summer, go looking for baseball on TV and find everything but, from NFL Europe to women's golf. What, if anything, can be done to halt baseball's slide in popularity?

 

 

 

JAMES: I advocate a Constitutional amendment against playing soccer.

 

 

 

Seriously, the problem is that baseball is not a television game, and the television era has not been particularly good to baseball. To be fair, professional baseball tolerates an unconscionable amount of standing around and posturing, and this makes it less exciting than it ought to be and therefore less attractive to young people. I think there's a growing recognition of this, but the problem is that even when one recognizes the problem it's very hard to fix. People in baseball are working on it, however.

 

 

 

Also: An awful lot of popularity trends are cyclical, and I do believe that in the future, when the game is played crisply at the highest levels, people will realize what an exciting game it is, and remember that it's fun.

 

 

 

TAE: You've advocated a number of changes to speed up games, such as thickening the barrels of today's whippet-thin bats, limiting time outs, limiting pitchers, etc. A couple of years ago, some suggested limiting the number of intentional walks. You might call this the Barry Bonds Rule.

 

 

 

JAMES: I think intentional walks should be limited, but among the things that slow down baseball games intentional walks don't rank in the top 50.

 

 

 

I suggest a batter should be able to decline a walk. Not only an intentional walk, but any walk. The batter's team should able to say, "No thanks, I don't want that walk." And if you walk him again, he goes to second base and anybody already on moves up two bases. The reason that should be the rule is because the walk was created to force the pitcher to throw hittable pitches to the batter. That is the walk's natural function. To allow the walk to become something the defense can use to its advantage with no response from the offense is illogical and counterproductive.

 

 

 

TAE: Don't TV time outs, which break the rhythm of the game, make baseball unendurable for many viewers?

 

 

 

JAMES: I think prolonged TV time outs are a serious mistake, because they do make the game less enjoyable. That depresses both live attendance and viewership. And it also tends to create an artificial surplus of advertising time on baseball games, which drives down the price of advertising minutes.

 

 

 

TAE: In his recent State of the Union speech, President Bush called for a ban on steroids in baseball.

 

 

 

JAMES: I was glad to see it. I think it is a serious issue. It's serious because what professional athletes do now, college athletes will be doing in five years, and high school athletes will be doing in ten years or sooner than that, and there are serious negative health consequences. We can't permit baseball to be a wedge which opens that door. So I was glad to see him pay some attention to it.

 

 

 

TAE: When you see Ugueth Urbina exchange kisses with Ivan Rodriquez after every Florida Marlins victory you realize that the influx of Asians, Latin Americans, Australians, and so forth has brought cultural changes to baseball. Do you think this is ultimately a good thing for the game?

 

 

 

JAMES: It is a good thing for baseball. It is a way in which baseball is very American in the best sense. We live in a society which searches out the best in everything and embraces it without disfavor. We go all over the world looking for baseball players and say, "We don't care how weird you are. We don't care what color you are. We don't care what habits you have. If you can play baseball, we want you." And that's very American.

 

 

 

TAE: Last summer an ESPN baseball writer basically accused sabermetrics of having a cultural/racial bias because it undervalues statistics produced by African-American players.

 

 

 

JAMES: Sabermetric analysis is not one percent kinder to white players than it is to black. The assumption of that writer was that black players have speed and defense but lack the skills which are most respected in sabermetrics. This is absolutely false. Black players have no tendency whatsoever to lack the skills which are most valued in sabermetrics.

 

 

 

TAE: After years of obscurity, the old Negro Leagues have enjoyed a vogue over the last decade. For reasons of political correctness, do writers now overstate the quality of ball in the Negro Leagues?

 

 

 

JAMES: Not at all. The opposite is still the case--more writers than not still underestimate the quality of the play. There were players in those leagues who were as good as Ty Cobb, but whom the average fan has still never heard of.

 

 

 

TAE: Should a team's racial composition ever be a factor when building a club, in terms of "chemistry"? The Florida Marlins reportedly signed Latin players quite consciously because they have a large Latin fan base.

 

 

 

JAMES: It's hard enough to make judgments about baseball players when you make them on the basis of: How fast does he run? How well does he throw? What's he like in the clubhouse? If you start building in irrelevant factors it makes the process not difficult but impossible.

 

 

 

TAE: I've read that you enjoy watching all levels of baseball. Can you apply the same sort of analysis to lower levels of baseball that you do to the major leagues?

 

 

 

JAMES: What I believe to be true about the highest levels of baseball I also believe to be true about the lowest levels of baseball. But some of the fictions that dominate the highest levels of baseball are in place because they are true about lower levels of baseball. For example, one of the primary reasons that people so tremendously overvalue speed in major league baseball is because speed is very important in lower levels of baseball. But as you move up the ladder, the nature of the game changes so it becomes less and less important.

 

 

 

Same with the throwing arm. People overvalue a great throwing arm in right field because that means a great deal among ten-year-olds playing baseball--it's almost like they're an extra infielder. But it means very little at the major league level.

 

 

 

TAE: When the Kansas City Royals play the Red Sox, for whom do you root?

 

 

 

JAMES: The Red Sox, without any mixed feelings at all. The truth is, the Royals from 1996 through 2002 were damned hard to root for when you were trying. It was a relief not having to root for them, although they were a lot more fun in 2003.

 

 

 

TAE: "Never meet your heroes," goes the adage. After being a fan of baseball for so many years, what was it like moving to the inside? In what ways are baseball people--players and front-office folks--different than what you had expected?

 

 

 

JAMES: The only general manager who was ever a hero of mine was Branch Rickey, who unfortunately I won't meet on this earth.

 

 

 

The Red Sox are so atypical that it is hard to answer this. You know, I consulted in salary negotiations for many years--from 1979 into the early 1990s--so I knew a lot of baseball executives a long time ago. Some of those general managers of the 1980s were really sharp, well-prepared guys. And some of them really weren't.

 

 

 

You walk around the baseball operations office at Fenway today and you've got guys from Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton, USC, Virginia. I've done a lot of things, from magazines to work on a loading dock, and I have never had the opportunity to work with such a fantastic group of people as I do now.

 

 

 

TAE: Do you have a favorite baseball movie?

 

 

 

JAMES: Bull Durham. It's subtle, sophisticated, and it works as well now as it did when it was first made.

 

 

 

I tend not to like baseball movies when I first see them. When I first saw The Natural I absolutely hated it. Having seen it again, two or three more times, I realize that it's not so bad. When I first saw Field of Dreams I didn't like it either, but I've come to like it. I'm probably just too close to the subject.

 

 

 

TAE: Besides Pete Rose, baseball's other famous exile, Shoeless Joe Jackson, has become something of a sentimental favorite in recent years. Have movies like Eight Men Out and Field of Dreams whitewashed the sins of the Black Sox, or were Shoeless Joe and Buck Weaver really victims?

 

 

 

JAMES: Recently, a former baseball commissioner suggested Jackson was almost retarded. Where did he get that idea? In the spring of 1918 The Sporting News reported that Jackson had invested so wisely in real estate in his home state of South Carolina that with the coming of the war his rental properties were making him more money than his baseball salary.

 

 

 

Have recent movies sentimentalized Joe Jackson? Of course. But I don't think there is any reason to despise Jackson. He wasn't an evil man. He was a man who made a very serious mistake, and paid a fair price for it.

 

 

 

TAE: You could probably do your job anywhere, yet you stay in Kansas. Is Kansas important to you as part of your personal identity?

 

 

 

JAMES: Lawrence, Kansas, is a very good place to live. We have all the seasons. We have most of the amenities of modern life without traffic and high crime rates and other problems. It's just a good place.

 

 

 

TAE: You've expressed interest in the past in criminal behavior.

 

 

 

JAMES: When I read books about criminals, I always think that there's a fairly subtle difference in habits and ways of thinking about problems that separates me from them. And I'm always trying to put my finger on what it is. Crime books are sort of useful in that they remind you of the consequences of bad decisions.

 

 

 

TAE: Cooperstown, New York--home of the Baseball Hall of Fame--and Dyersville, Iowa--home of the "Field of Dreams"--are the two most popular baseball tourist spots in the country, yet nothing actually happened in either place. Does baseball prefer myth to reality?

 

 

 

JAMES: Baseball certainly prefers myth to reality. That's a part of human nature. All human beings from time out of memory have invented creation myths to explain things.

 

 

 

TAE: What do you see when you compare baseball's past to the present?

 

 

 

JAMES: One of the great differences between present and earlier generations is that those old guys really believed in being tough. They believed that it was important to make yourself tough. In our society we try to make each other less tough.

 

 

 

It is certainly true that the athletes of the 1950s and previous were tougher than the athletes of today. But sports are bucking the culture in this respect. Sports are a sort of island in which it is still important to be tougher than the norm. Sports haven't abandoned hardness and strength and masculinity, because they can't. So they're tenaciously hanging onto the concept of being tough when everyone else is trying to get rid of it. I think that's the sporting world's way of trying to tell us something.

 

Disagree with changing the intentional walk rule. The best penalty already exists. You give the offense a free baserunner.

 

Agree with the line about commercials. Postseason baseball is nearly intolerable with so many commercial breaks lasting four minutes apiece. Offer less commercials, and make the money back through scarcity.