The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract

Rating:
Summary: Why is baseball a beautiful game? Bill James knows!
Review: I almost fell out of my chair when I saw "The New Bill James Historical Abstract" in the bookstore. James is every baseball fan wrapped into one and has always been able to see the cold statistical side of baseball along the human side. He even talks about uniform styles and baseball players' looks, which my wife enjoys. This is the kind of book that it takes months to completly consume, the reader starts at the beginning, but then a short tale leads us to another area to compare, then off we go to another similar player who we remember,then to something else. For baseball lovers this book is a must, but for the casual fan this is also a teriffic book. I became obsessed with his 1985 "Historical Abstract" and his yearly publication when I was in my early twenties, I hope young people today find this book and share some of my experiences.

Rating:
Summary: Another Hit for Bill James
Review: The first part of the book - "The Game" - is a fascinating compendium of tidbits about each decade of the game's history, and is a lot of fun to browse at random.

The second part - "Player Ratings and Comments" - is equally good and lends itself to both browsing and sequential reading. Yes, it would be nice to have a detailed description of how Win Shares is calculated, given that it's mentioned on virtually every page of the section. Yes, some of the player rankings seem a bit curious, to say the least, and some of the player evaluations are sometimes silly. However, whether you agree with Bill or not, this section is still a fascinating read. I can't get enough of it and wish he'd included the top 200 at each position.

Regarding the various statistical approaches used in the book, one must appreciate that they're not the ultimate word on the subject - they're all just one man's opinions and best efforts at analyzing a large and difficult body of data. No evaluation of players is going to be perfect and definitive, so appreciate Bill's numbers for what they are - the product of a very knowledgeable baseball historian and statistician.

One glaring gaffe appears in the essay entitled "State of the Union". The comment is that the UA Saint Louis Maroons "eventually became the St. Louis Cardinals", which is not true. The Maroons joined the NL for two seasons after the UA died, moved to Indianapolis for three more, and then expired. The Cardinals' ancestor was the AA Browns, who moved to the NL in 1892, after the demise of the AA. (BTW, what's this essay doing in the section on the 1870's when the UA operated in 1884?)

Rating:
Summary: Bold, brilliant, and endlessly entertaining tour de force
Review: I am not the fanatical type whom one might think is the typical buyer of this book. I am just a lukewarm baseball fan, and while I knew the author when we lived in the same town and worked at the same place twenty-five years ago, I never discovered his brilliance as a writer, statistician, observer of the human condition, even philosopher, until I started reading his annual "Baseball Abstracts" in the '80s. I looked forward to the appearance of that paperback every year, and bought copies for friends.

But I never got around to buying or reading the first "historical" abstract. Never mind. This book is informative, convincing, subversive, and above all, entertaining.
It addresses virtually every aspect of the sport, including its history, its future, its best players, even, through the contributions of James' wife, the appearance of players. And, of course, you get a huge dose of statistics, including some that James introduced to the game. He is utterly convincing in the use of these statistics to support his opinions--many of which are surprising. (Such as that my current local team-- a perennial loser in the post season, have two players who are among the top 100 in history.)

Like the annual "abstracts", this book's commentaries on the players are different according to what James wants to say about the player--or possibly some other issue. So sometimes you get a lengthy essay about something tangential; sometimes you get a few sentences. That is part of the charm of the book. Just try opening any page and you find a gem of a commentary, whether about Pete Rose or Dan Quisenberry. James' rigorous analysis of almost all the players you know and remember, and some you don't, are right on--try his analysis of, for example, Rickey Henderson or Craig Biggio.

This is a wonderful book; it's the kind that you want to keep on reading, pick up again and again. Or can't put down. because the author's comments on one subject or player stimulate you to want to see what he says about something or someone else.

Rating:
Summary: Feel like staying up all night?
Review: One of my friends who lives two blocks from Wrigley Field but (inexplicably) does not give a hoot about baseball once commented to me, "I can't stand baseball fans. They're so hung up on stats." My reply: "So what?"

The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract is the kind of work that would absolutely drive my friend mad. Well, at least a solid third of it would drive him crazy.

If you're a big statistics guy, this is your book. If you're a big sports trivia guy, this is your book. If you're into lists, this is your book. If you're looking for a highly educated opinion about who is the greatest to play the game decade-by-decades and cumulatively over the last 140 years, this is your book. If you just plain love baseball and don't like what typically passes as a baseball publication, this is your book.

The Abstract combines the infromational content of an almanac with large doses of sports reporting -- one part Baseball Almanac, another part Sports Illustrated. James conveys the feeling that he actually watched all of the thousands of major league players covered in this mammoth volume, going all the way back to the 1870 season (with a brief rundown on the happenings before that year), and also has a nice section on the sadly underappreciated stars of the Negro Leagues. He does a great job of subtly pointing out the significance of baseball in the evolving American societal spectrum. He seamlessly goes from stats to stories to analysis to prediction, and the journey is thoroughly enjoyable the whole way through.

This book is like reading Ken Burns' "Baseball" documentary series -- if Burns hadn't gotten himself hung up on the New York teams for mindless hours on end. (Did that annoy anyone else? Twelve seconds on Ernie Banks? That's it? Ten minutes on the first pitiful decade of Mets baseball? What?! Why?!)

James treats the game as any sports enthusiast should: with a careful blend of scientific objectivity (by the way of practically a million figures and statistical analyses) with an adoring fan's subjectivity (like the guy who sits behind you at the game who seems to have an opinion on everything, only this time the opinions are balanced and backed up).

This book is not for everyone. If you're a casual fan and looking for a great sports novel, pick up a David Halberstam book. If you're into the intellectual, esoteric view of the game and all its possibilities, grab a George Will book. This book is for people who love the game for the personalities and numbers, who watch about 150 games a year, and think "Baseball Tonight" should have its own network channel. If you are a casual fan looking to not only familiarize yourself with baseball but also truly understand the game, this is also your book. Beware: it has the potential turn someone with a passing interest in the game into a complete fanatic.

One minor drawback: the index is somewhat unreliable. A 2-page discrepency seems to pop up at some point (I can't seem to find the exact spot) but just as mysteriously the error corrects itself somewhere (again, I don't know where).

This is really a great resource for baseball nuts. So buy it, love it, and memorize all one thousand pages of it. (Just kidding.)

Rating:
Summary: Many Hits--But Some Misses
Review: James' latest work has numerous strengths. While some critics have found fault with the rating system used in this book as compared to the rating system used in his previous Historical Abstract, he explains his system pretty well. The book's biggest flaw lies in James' repeated digressions from the topic at hand.

James, for example, rates Ron Santo ahead of Brooks Robinson at third base. Since Robinson is almost universally considered to have been the better player, a detailed comparison of the 2 players was warranted. Instead, James spends his entire Robinson comment explaining why he thinks that middle infielders are generally nicer people than left fielders are.

When James sticks to baseball as a sport, he is as brilliant as ever. His evaluation of the 1961 Yankees, for example, is a work of genius. He breaks new ground in his analysis of defensive statistics. He has a series of thoughtful essays about the relationship between pitchers' strikeout rates and career length, about the best use of relief pitchers, and about the decline of the free minor leagues.

Unfortunately, James spends far too much time analyzing baseball as a morality play. He refers to Joe Morgan, for example, as "a self-important little prig." It is not possible to evaluate the likes of Cobb, Ruth, or Hornsby without addressing their personal characteristics, but it is preferable to stick to professional characteristics when evaluating the vast majority of players.

James, in short, swings for the fences in this book. When he connects the ball travels a long way, but he misses more often here than he has in his past work.

Rating:
Summary: Why is baseball a beautiful game? Bill James knows!
Review: I almost fell out of my chair when I saw "The New Bill James Historical Abstract" in the bookstore. James is every baseball fan wrapped into one and has always been able to see the cold statistical side of baseball along the human side. He even talks about uniform styles and baseball players' looks, which my wife enjoys. This is the kind of book that it takes months to completly consume, the reader starts at the beginning, but then a short tale leads us to another area to compare, then off we go to another similar player who we remember,then to something else. For baseball lovers this book is a must, but for the casual fan this is also a teriffic book. I became obsessed with his 1985 "Historical Abstract" and his yearly publication when I was in my early twenties, I hope young people today find this book and share some of my experiences.

Rating:
Summary: Great Original, Poor New Edition
Review: The original 2001 "New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract," which makes up the bulk of this 2003 edition, is a fantastic book, perhaps James' magnum opus. If someone said that no baseball library is complete without this book, he would be wrong. No baseball library is adequate without this book.

However, there is no reason for owners of the 2001 edition to consider buying the new edition. There's really nothing new here. Well, sure, James has added a few pages of new material, but it's not very good and it does not add anything substantive to any of the myriad topics raised in the book's 2001 text. Most of the genuinely new material consists of James' corrections. But the editors of the new edition have not actually made any of these corrections to the text itself. For example, James writes that he erred in saying that the 1914 A's had history's best infield, judged by Win Shares; a mathematical error led him to overlook the 1913 A's, whose infielders earned even more Win Shares. But page 548 still lists the 1914 A's as the Win Sharingest infield of all time.

Most infuriatingly of all, James casually mentions in this edition that all index references to pages after 945 were off by a page in the previous edition. But the new edition does not correct this error; the new index is just as wrong as it was in the old edition. So when you go to look up John Dopson, the index tells you to look on page 956. Only his name does not appear there; it appears on page 957.

Here, then, is something innovative: A reference book that cannot be referred to, and a new edition that mentions but does not correct errors in the previous edition.

All in all, this might be the sorriest excuse for a "new edition" in recent publishing history. Considered in the abstract, "The New Bill James Historical Abstract" deserves five stars. But considered as an updated edition of a classic, the 2003 version deserves no stars at all.

Rating:
Summary: A must-have for any serious baseball fan
Review: The Historical Baseball Abstract is one of the most important books ever written about baseball. It covers the history of the Major Leagues in a very enlightening and entertaining way. This book puts the lie to the image of Bill James as a number-crunching statistician. Stats are only part of this book - it's also full of interesting historical information, insights into personalities and commentary about players and teams.

This version of the Historical Abstract is considerably different from the original. In my opinion, it's worth having both.

Rating:
Summary: Great...but Not for the Casual Fan
Review: I like this book, but I must caustion the prospective buyer that Bill James is an acquired taste, even for fans of advanced baseball statistics.

The most ironic thing about James is that he has been for the past 25 years the vanguard of a group that seeks, among other things, to examine the game of baseball objectively by using numbers instead of impressions, gut feelings, etc. Yet for all of the statistics in the book, much of it is dedicated to very opinionated commentaries that
1) are somtimes very amusing,
2) are often pure demagoguery,
3) read like an extended weblog
4) because they are irratic in length and quality of argument
5) and have too many annoying lists of points like this one.

With all of that being said, the dedicated baseball fan who can take the obnoxious side of James with a grain of salt will find this a rewarding read

Rating:
Summary: Stat-Heads Everywhere, Rejoice!
Review: This latest edition shows James at his finest, in the form of numerous essays and thoughts about the game, ranging from the "history" he provides of the game from the 1870's through the end of the 1990s to his 100 best players at each position. Argue all you want about his selections (and what baseball fan doesn't like to argue about the all-times best players?), but he backs up his selections with cold hard facts. Statistics don't lie, they just get twisted around an awful lot. Or so it would seem. You can disagree with James' system (and I'm sure lots of folk have), but still it provides excellent food for thought. And it also shows how some players in certain seasons actually had much better seasons than it first appears, based on variables like the ballpark they played in, how well or poorly the team they played on did, whether the team was a "power" or "base hit" team and so on.

He also briefly discusses his Win Shares formula, which of course was the basis for another book. This formula in his view tends to show who may have been overrated or underrated during their career. Any time you put together a list of the all-time greats, you will always encounter the Hall of Famers like Williams, Ruth, Cobb, Mays, Aaron, Spahn, Young, Mathewson, and so on. But once you get past the "upper echelon" of players at each position, it becomes a little more difficult to decide who cracks the "Top 100" and who doesn't?

This is a book any baseball fan should have, not just because of the "reams of stats" in the book but because of the ideas James brings forth. And as someone else mentioned he does not hide his likes and dislikes (and I'm with James about reducing the number of relief pitchers in today's games!) in his essays. I've known about James for years, now I can say I have at least a casual knowledge of his "system" of rating players and teams.