The Pietist Schoolman

Yesterday I celebrated the official start to the Major League Baseball season by describing my favorite book written by an active baseball player: pitcher/shortstop/lawyer/labor organizer John Montgomery Ward’s 1888 how-to guide, Base-Ball.

But I’m enough of a traditionalist to believe that the honor of starting the season ought to belong (as it did for decades) to the Cincinnati Reds, the current manifestation of the first professional baseball team. So in honor of the real Opening Day of the 2012 season, I’ll continue this mini-series on baseball literature by extolling the virtues of the book I’d take with me to a desert island if I were allowed only one about baseball: The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract.

I first encountered Bill James in the Stillwater, MN public library as a nerdy middle schooler in the late 1980s. At that time, James had stopped putting out the original Statistical Abstract (focused on evaluating contemporary players and problems — and self-published because editors didn’t think there was a market), but had been convinced to apply his unique blend of statistical analysis and iconoclastic, engaging writing to the history of the game. I think I first read the Historical Baseball Abstract in its second (1988) edition, but it still had the somewhat unpolished, DIY feel of the earlier works. And I consumed it, probably checking it out twenty or thirty times and using James-invented statistics like Runs Created to help me win arguments with my dad about the relative merits of Wade Boggs vs. his childhood hero, Eddie Matthews.

And at that point, James and the discipline he helped to found (“sabermetrics,” from the acronym for the Society for American Baseball Research) were still on the margins of the game. (Billy Beane was then playing out the string on a terribly disappointing career, and could never have imagined he would one day be the leading character in an Oscar-nominated movie about a small market general manager who used sabermetric analysis to find undervalued, underpriced talent.) But then everyone in the baseball world started rethinking the value of a BB, the cost of a CS, and whether batting average or saves meant anything. In 2001, two years before he was hired by the Boston Red Sox, James completely revamped his Historical abstract, turning into a nearly thousand-page tome divided into two parts: a decade-by-decade history of the game; and a ranking of the greatest players at every position, relying primarily on his revolutionary new Win Shares statistic.

And the whole thing is well worth every one of the forty-five dollars I scraped together as a grad student in order to buy it in hardcover the day it came out.

The player rankings remain as fun as ever. My dad was happy to learn that Eddie Matthews came in as history’s 3rd best 3B. (1. Mike Schmidt, 2. George Brett, and 4. yep, Wade Boggs). And, demonstrating just how lousy the hot corner has been throughout baseball history, the man who had the assist on the last play of the first World Series my beloved Minnesota Twins ever won was #34.

But the first half of my copy of the book is more creased and tattered, dealing as it does with the history of the game. Let me quote his introduction at length, in appreciation of its insights into the appeal of baseball, in overlooking its rather silly generalizations about “academics” and how (he thinks) we teach history, and in the hope that he and his lawyers appreciate the tribute/publicity and that it convinces at least a couple of you to buy the book:

In American society, our ways of teaching about baseball are better than our ways of teaching about anything else. No matter how it is that your mind works, baseball reaches out to you. If you’re an emotional person, baseball asks for your heart. If you are a thinking man or a thinking woman, baseball wants your opinion. Whether you are left-brain or right-brain, Type A or Type Z, whether your mind is bent toward mathematics or toward history or psychology or geometry, whether you are young or old, baseball has its way of asking for you. It you are a reader, there is always something new to read about baseball, and always something old. If you are a sedentary person, a TV watcher, baseball is on TV; if you always have to be going somewhere, baseball is somewhere you can go. If you are a collector, baseball offers you a hundred things that you can collect. If you have children, baseball is something you can do with children; if you have parents and cannot talk to them, baseball is something you can still talk to them about.

…School teachers and academics, in ways they seem constitutionally incapable of understanding, tell us to go away and leave them alone whenever we show any interest in what they are doing. The very essence of baseball is that it does not. The essential definition of baseball is that baseball is a thing which welcomes and sustains our interest. Whoever we are, however we think, however old we are, wherever we live, whatever we like to do, baseball wants us—and this is what makes baseball what it is.

It is, then, peculiarly unsatisfying to read a railroad track history of baseball—this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened. Baseball doesn’t preach at us; baseball surrounds us. It was the goal of this book to create a history of baseball that would surround you, that would reach out to you and take your hand. This is done, of course, with details: hundreds and hundreds of tiny little details. What was it like to be a baseball fan in 1923? Who were the heroes, who were the rogues, who were the comedians? What was in the paper in the mornings?

A linear history of baseball drops the details once those details no longer mean anything—once they no longer serve to move the narrative of baseball forward. Thus, in an odd way, it drops the things that make baseball what it is. An academic, writing a history of baseball, often sounds very much like an academic writing about cancer research. He leaves out the details that make it fun.

Well, I don’t mean to criticize anyone, but if baseball exists only to be enjoyed, and you leave out the details that make it fun, then aren’t you leaving out what makes it what it is? We cover each decade in a box with a series of questions. These questions are a way of reaching into baseball history for the details. Who was the handsomest player; who was the ugliest? Who was the best hitter; who was the worst? Who was different from everyone else? What was right with the game; what was wrong with it? Who disgraced the game; who ennobled it? Who threw the best curve ball; who threw the best heat? Who was the best bunter? Little, tiny details that don’t mean anything anymore, except for the fact that it is those details that enable baseball to embrace us. Baseball is and was a billion details. Perhaps I have saved a couple of thousand from the crush of time.

My goal isn’t to tell you what happened in baseball in 1913. My goal is to give you a sense of what it was like to be a baseball fan in 1913, as best I can in this forum…. (pp. 5-6)

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