LAWRENCE, Kan. • The bearded face that launched a thousand stats and gleefully capsized as many baseball doctrines, Bill James could really have some fun letting his inner contrarian go to work on his public image.
For all the articles and stories that call him "King of Stats," "baseball's Pythagoras" or, as "60 Minutes" did, simply "Stat Man," in his office sits an unfinished essay that he's writing on a subject other than baseball. A self-described breakfast hobbyist, he enjoys going somewhere tasty enough to return to and quiet enough to write. The reality of James sitting there some mornings and writing fiction in longhand contrasts with the notion he's some statistical turtle, a recluse numbers whiz awash in box scores. Without breaking a sweat, he could unravel the misconceptions about him as quickly as he incinerated the belief that batting average is the best way to measure a hitter.
James deserves the James treatment.
But as with batting average, the myth contains some truth. On a morning earlier this month, just before welcoming a reporter for the day, James passed time by fiddling with his lineup for a tabletop baseball game. The game, Ball Park Baseball, was invented in the 1950s, and James fell for it in college. Running his Ball Park team inspired some of the research he did then that has changed how real baseball teams are run now.
Still prolific, James remains more writer than mathematician, more warm-blooded historian than cold-storage calculator. He's more outgoing than he was when he coined the term sabermetrics, and he's written a nonfiction book on crime that is soon to be published. But while he has other interests, that morning round of Ball Park reveals a perception that is true: He has one obsession.
Baseball.
"Every morning when I wake up I always remember dreams, and I always have," James said. "Seven days out of 10, I remember a dream about baseball. Baseball is central to how my view of the world is organized, and I tend — to my detriment — to see the rest of the world as an extension of the principles that I look for in the study of baseball.
"I don't think you could take baseball out of it for me at all."
In the past 20 years, it's become clear that James cannot be taken out of baseball either. From the scoreboards that feature an alphabet soup of stats to the Cy Young Award voting, James' influence and the rise of sabermetrics are everywhere. In the past two years, Tim Lincecum and Felix Hernandez have won their league's highest pitching honors with two of the lowest win totals in the award's history. The false value of a pitcher's record is a "Moneyball" tenet, and its acceptance by voters is due in part to James and his myth-busting.
The best-selling author's outside-the-box concepts are now so inside baseball that even he has a seat in baseball operations, joining the Boston Red Sox as a senior adviser in 2002.
What really made James leap from cottage industry to mainstream to front office wasn't the stats he invented or popularized, but the skeptical view and authoritative voice he had in presenting them. He entertained while resonating with others who wanted, gasp, proof. His friend Rob Neyer likens him to Stephen Jay Gould, who made science writing smartly entertaining, and Stephen King, who made horror conversational. How very James: Dive deep into the numbers to find the numbers were wrong all along.
"Look at the state of baseball today, how it's covered and how it's run. All of that is Bill," said Neyer, who writes for SB Nation. "Without him, 'Moneyball' isn't published. There aren't as many websites doing this stuff. Some jobs don't exist. If it hadn't been for Bill, it would still be a cult thing. There were other sabermetricians working, but they never reached the audience that Bill reached, and then populated the front offices of baseball a decade later."
Keith Law, part of that audience who went from Toronto's front office to now writing for ESPN.com, stated in an e-mail: "James didn't discover fire, but he invented the match."
a comfortable tone
James' home in this Big 12 college town isn't too far from where he grew up a Kansas City A's fan in Mayetta, Kan. His office is a cottage, marked by a cement baseball — roughly the size of a beach ball — that his wife gave him. Snow isn't the only reason he wrote at home this winter rather walking to the office.
"Inertia, I think," he deadpanned.
At 6 feet 4 with an imposing posture and professor's beard, James could be a bear of a man, but that dry wit and his comfortable tone soften the frame. He collects figures of famous people — a foot-tall Babe Ruth greets visitors in the front hallway. On a living room bookcase, near W.C. Fields and Groucho Marx, is a bobblehead of James, a suit painted on. That proves he has one, James kids.
The chief reason he didn't go corporate, didn't pursue a beat writer job at a newspaper, and couldn't be a general manager now is that he lacks "good social skills" and was once "adversarial by nature," he explained. He admits that it's "dangerous to think out loud when you're in the middle of an interview," but still does. He describes how he got his warmly subversive style from writing "funny notes to classmates to crack them up" in high school.
James seamlessly drops Marv Throneberry's 145 RBIs in 1956 with the Class AAA Denver Bears into conversation, and sometimes seems like he's talking about one thing while thinking about a dozen others.
"I'm never completely at ease around Bill," Neyer says, "because I know that he's over there thinking at a level that I can never quite get to."
The temporary headquarters for the Bill James brand is on the second floor of his Lawrence home, past his lounging dog Yawkey, named for the street outside Fenway Park, and up the stairs. James' empire includes the annual handbook Bill James Online and, announced Friday, a "Bill James Baseball IQ" app for iPhone and iPads. His desk has a laptop, stacks of loose paper, and the usual trappings of a writer's nook, right down to the four cases of Diet Pepsi. James explains that he's a "hoarder" and keeps everything, which means that fan note from author Norman Mailer is around somewhere.
"There's a lot more that I don't understand now than ever before," James said. "When I write something, I start with a question. … The answer tends to be in terms of math, which was just an accident. Take the most obscure question: Do different first base umpires have an impact on stolen base rates because of the way they call balks? I would print columns and columns of math, perhaps unwisely. So people perceive it as math, but it never was.
"It was an answer."
hooked on box scores
He's knows Throneberry's stats from '56 by heart because of a baseball card, and he can recite many more because of the Sporting News. The "bible of baseball" was one source for beloved box scores. He would clip them and save them in tin cans, 100 box scores per.
In later years, he would carry a box of Sporting News to work at the Stokely Van Camp Pork and Beans plant. He meticulously went over each box score, mining information, such as hitters' home-road splits and a pitcher's run support that he would chart by hand. When he served in the Army in South Korea, he got the Sporting News three weeks late. But he got it.
James recalls the exact dates of his service, from Dec. 3, 1971, to Oct. 10, 1973. He also knows the day his life pivoted: Aug. 1, 1975.
That evening he asked his future wife and mother of their three children, Susan McCarthy, out for their first date. Several hours earlier he had finished his first baseball story, on 20-game winners who hit .300, and mailed it to Baseball Digest for publication.
"One of the realizations that shaped my life in the mid-1970s was that I tried for several years to do something other than baseball," James said. "But my obsession with baseball was always a drain on my energy. I eventually realized that if I write about baseball, then all of this energy that is draining away from my professional efforts would drain into my professional efforts."
James borrowed from his economics degree and long before the word existed took a Freakonomics approach to baseball. He admits that he "tends to think much of what people say is nonsense." He wanted to explore baseball's nonsense. He also read the market. If a few people in Lawrence were interested in dissecting baseball doctrine, then there had to be demand. He began self-publishing Baseball Abstracts in the late 1970s, selling about 50 copies in 1977.
Fast forward more than 30 years and Baseball Prospectus' annual tome is a bestseller, statistics are booming business, and the 62-year-old James is one of Time's 100 most influential people in the world. He's hardly, as one Hall of Fame baseball writer once said about him, "divorced from reality."
He is reality.
He has the rings to prove it.
"If I was there (to help careers), then I was a step that they could step on," James said. "I kind of used to be ahead of everybody else when it came to this analysis. Not anymore. I miss that. But I enjoy being able to go to a larger number of sites and find out things. …
"I've got a couple World Series rings that I'm proud of," he added later, referring to the spoils from 2004 and 2007 with Boston. "Wasn't expecting that."
a book without stats
This summer, James' new book, "Popular Crime," debuts, completing a 25-year quest marked by false starts and half-finishes. It has no charts. It has no remixed stats. It also, purposefully, has no baseball. James scrubbed it free of any baseball references or clichés, even avoiding a description of the location for a Boston Strangler murder that happened near Fenway Park.
Rich with James' confident and caustic style, the book says Jack the Ripper is a favorite of "quasi-academic twits who wouldn't recognize a serial murderer if he ate their liver." By comparison, he lets ballplayers off easy. James calls his pet project the "best book I've written."
That's always been his goal with baseball.
He didn't set out to change the game, just write well about it.
Sure, he found himself working on arbitration cases for agents, clashing with baseball establishment along the way, and when he couldn't find the stats he wanted, he conjured them. But beyond James' guru rep and oracle image, it's clear this was never about numbers. James wanted a better understanding so that he could be a better writer and do what writers do — share a better appreciation of a passion.
"The wonderful thing about baseball is it can be appreciated from so many different ways," James said. "If you like history, baseball has a wonderful history. If you like literature, baseball has pretty good books. If you like to watch television, baseball is on television. … The way my mother-in-law loves baseball isn't at all the same way I do. She doesn't care anything at all if a steal of third is a good play with one out. But she loves baseball.
"Now," he concluded, "there's one more door opened into the love of baseball than there used to be."
He's there holding it for others.
That is, after he picked the lock.
