"I ain’t the world’s best writer,
ain’t the world’s best speller
But when I believe in somethin,’’ I’m the loudest yeller"
( W O O D Y G U T H R I E )
Review for November 25, 2001 (scroll down for archives)
The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract
by Bill James
I can't think of a way to say this nicely, so I'll just say it: The New Bill
James Historical Baseball Abstract makes me want to vomit.
Just so you know where I'm coming from, I loved James' book on baseball
managers. I also think his 1988 edition of the Historical Abstract is one of the
best baseball books ever published. So perhaps I'm holding him to unfairly high
standards. I guess it’s like the Bob Dylan song “High Water” – “As
great as you are, man, you'll never be greater than yourself.” Still,
expectations or no expectations, this book is a huge disappointment.
Where to begin? Well, let’s start with the book’s look.
It’s missing. If you recall, the original edition had some eye-pleasing
graphic design, with pleasant little line drawings by James’ wife. No more.
Removed to make room for more words, I suppose. That’s fine, but the book’s
decade-by-decade sections, one of the greatest pleasures
of the original edition, have been cut down to almost nothing. Many of the more
amusing anecdotes have been removed, but relatively few new ones have been
added. The new 1980s and 1990s sections are skimpy at best; blink and you'll
miss 'em. James clearly places so little importance on this section of the book
that one wonders why he included it at all.
Bill James is also crankier than he used to be. Some of his
witty comments, once hysterically funny, now seem merely bitter. And the
constant right-wing social commentary, having nothing to do with baseball, gets
old after a while. And some of James’ political babble is completely
fabricated, like his assertion that “in 1964 [Jackie] Robinson worked for
Barry Goldwater.” (p. 263) This is patently false. In fact Robinson despised
Goldwater and thought he was “the devil incarnate,” according to Arnold
Rampersad’s superb Jackie Robinson: A Biography. “In my opinion he is
a bigot, an advocate of white supremacy, and more dangerous than Governor
Wallace,” Robinson said of Goldwater. If James can be dead wrong on this, what
else is he completely clueless about?
In the player ratings section of the book James pens fascinating, in-depth comments about some players, while saying next to nothing about others. It’s hard to believe that after decades of studying baseball, James has literally only one word to say about Jeff Bagwell: “Pass.” His comment on Monte Irvin isn’t much better: It’s two sentences long, and begins with “I’m not going to try to rate Monte Irvin.” The basis on which he is rating the players, of course, is a new system called “Win Shares.” I will leave it for others to argue over whether win shares is a valid system for rating players. I have no idea whether the system is any good or not, in part because James doesn’t bother to explain it adequately, even though it’s the basis for the entire book.
The pitcher ratings section is terrible. James was obviously completely disinterested in writing about the pitchers, and did it only because he felt obligated to. At other positions he ranks the Top 100 players, all the way down to the likes of Ivan DeJesus and Rafael Ramirez. But he also cuts off the pitching section at 100 players, meaning guys like Rollie Fingers get left out of the book. At one point, James even admits that he was going to rank another 100 pitchers, but he blew it off because “the computer that had that list crashed yesterday.” Two of the pitchers on James’ 1970s all-star team are “Steve Carlson” and “Garylord Perry.” In fact, Carlson even has his own entry in the index, right next to Steve Carlton. Grover Cleveland Alexander and Pete Alexander (his brother?) also have separate entries in the index, as do Mordecai Brown and Three Finger Brown.
There is one final, and most serious, problem with the
book. It’s the most poorly edited book -- baseball or otherwise -- I've ever
seen. There are literally thousands of errors, both factual and typographical.
The book’s editor, Bill Rosen of The Free Press, is probably a perfectly nice
man, so I hope he won’t get too upset if I suggest that he should pursue a new
line of work – gardening, perhaps, or maybe playing the guitar. Anything but
editing books. The Historical Abstract has all the earmarks of a work
that was rushed to the press with no consideration whatsoever for putting out a
quality product. The title of one of the player ratings chapters, “Last Minute
Notes,” would have been an appropriate title for the book as a whole. It would
be easy to blame the editor for this. Too easy, in fact. In the end, all those
errors are James’ responsibility. Does he really care so little about his own
work that he can't be bothered to spell people’s names right and write
sentences that make sense?
When I first opined that the book contained “literally thousands of errors,” I was questioned by a few people. After all, in a 1,000-page book, “thousands of errors” would be at least one per page. Well, I didn't keep track of each specific mistake I noticed because I have other things to do, like sleep and eat. Also, the last thing I want to do is become another Keith Olbermann, the pompous jerk who made a list of all the “errors” in Ken Burns' documentary and then handed it down from Mount Sinai. But I really believe there are thousands of errors in this book. I've noticed somewhere between one and two mistakes per page, which works out to between 1,000 and 2,000 mistakes. And those are only the ones I've noticed -- lord knows how many more there are. OK, let's take a look at a typical page -- page 178 is the page I randomly opened to. After a cursory look at this page, I've found five errors, maybe six.
On the Gold Glove team, Cristobal Torriente's name is misspelled.
Under "Drinking Men," Torriente's name is misspelled again.
It's arguable whether this qualifies as a mistake, but under "Drinking Men," James refers to Oliver Marcelle as Ollie Marcelle. I've never seen any reference to anyone ever calling him "Ollie." This is the equivalent of calling Frank Thomas "Frankie Thomas."
James identifies the "Best Defensive Team" as the 1910 Chicago American Giants. The only problem is, the Chicago American Giants did not exist in 1910. The team he's trying to refer to is the 1910 Leland Giants. Lest you think it's a typo, James repeats this mistake elsewhere in the book.
James says "the only park I know of built specifically for Negro Leaguers was White Sox park in Los Angeles." In fact, this park was not built specifically for Negro Leaguers; it was built for the California Winter League, an integrated league featuring both black and white players.
There are several parks that James is apparently unaware of which WERE built specifically for Negro Leaguers, most notably Greenlee Field in Pittsburgh and Stars Park in St. Louis.
Okay, that's six mistakes on one randomly selected page, just off the top of my head. If I cracked the books I wouldn't be surprised to find one or two more. I know all of us, including me, make mistakes -- but we usually don't make this many.
And now that I’ve gotten all the bad stuff out of the way, let me say that, in general, I enjoyed the book. I don’t think it’s a good book, and it’s so shoddily researched and written that I would never cite it as a source for anything. But as something frivolous and entertaining to read on a Sunday morning, I like it. James has interesting comments on so many position players – not the greats, but guys like Mike Scioscia and Jim Gilliam – that the book can grab you and not let go for hours. There are also a few fascinating snippets of sabermetric number crunching, as when James discusses the respective defensive abilities of Nap Lajoie and Jackie Robinson. (Jackie’s better than everybody thinks, while Lajoie’s been overrated by sabermetricians.)
All in all, one feels that James was going through the motions with this book, that he wrote it not because he wanted to, but because people expected him to. His heart is elsewhere, and it shows. Bill James in 2001 is a little like Babe Ruth in 1934. He was once a groundbreaker and a revolutionary, but the heady days of stardom are gone. Many others have passed him by. The crowd still loves him so much that they’ll overlook the fact that he’s not very good anymore. They still like watching him play.
Just watch out for 1935, Bill.
About the Book Reviews
I don’t fancy myself a literary critic, but I do enjoy reading books and discussing them. In the hopes that these pages will reach others who love books as much as I do, I will periodically post new book reviews to this site. (Ideally there will be a new book review posted every week, but we’ll see.) The reviews will be fairly brief, and I don’t plan on writing about every book I read. Rather, I’ll only be posting reviews of books I find to be especially moving or significant. (Why waste your time?) So if you enjoy discovering new books and ideas, stop by every once in a while and see what’s here.
Book Review Archives
January 13, 2001 Paul Robeson: A Biography by Martin Bauml Duberman
January 25, 2001 Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen
February 2, 2001 The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading, and Bubble
Gum Book by Fred Harris and Brendan C. Boyd
EricEnders.com
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