Bill James

60 Minutes had a very pleasant story on Bill James tonight. It's not often I'll intentionally watch something other than the Simpsons or Sunday Night Baseball at 8pm. But this was an exception. They talked about his early yearly abstracts, which sold a few copies. They also showed his Historical Baseball Abstract, which I think is one of the most informative books I've ever read. I recommend it if you've got some time and don't mind things that run a thousand pages. His decade-by-decade breakdown of trends, players, innovations, and lists is outstanding. Supplemented with sections on the minor leagues, independent leagues, and the Negro Leagues, there's just a wealth of information that fans of baseball history will soak up.

The story said he invented Sabermetrics, but there's a good number of people who work in the field, so I don't know if I'd go that far. There's a lot of things about it that I do like, mostly because the explanations of them seem to make sense. It's also fun listening to baseball mystics go into fits over how number crunchers are ruining the game. And of course, without Sabermetrics there would be no FJM blog. And there might not be a Rob Neyer as we know him, and he's the whole reason I signed up for ESPN Insider in the first place. Favorite sabermetric stat: Secondary Average. There's something I like about the formula. I tend to think of it as an expectation for each time a player comes to bat. Rob Neyer answered one of my emails about it, saying he doesn't pay too much attention to the stat. At least that's how I remember it. Oh well.