The Bill James Baseball Abstract

When Bill James published his original Historical Baseball Abstract in 1985, he produced an immediate classic, hailed by the Chicago Tribune as the “holy book of baseball.” Now, baseball's beloved “Sultan of Stats” (The Boston Globe) is back with a fully revised and updated edition for the new millennium. Like the original, The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract is really several books in one. The Game provides a century's worth of American baseball history, told one decade at a time, with energetic facts and figures about How, Where, and by Whom the game was played. In The Players, you'll find listings of the top 100 players at each position in the major leagues, along with James's signature stats-based ratings method called “Win Shares,” a way of quantifying individual performance and calculating the offensive and defensive contributions of catchers, pitchers, infielders, and outfielders. And there's more: the Reference section covers Win Shares for each season and each player, and even offers a Win Share team comparison. A must-have for baseball fans and historians alike, The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract is as essential, entertaining, and enlightening as the sport itself.

The man Newsweek once called “the guru of baseball” offers profiles of top managers, sidebars, statistics, and snapshots of each decade. Widely considered to be one of the greatest minds in the history of the game, Bill James has changed the way we think about the sport of baseball. In this chronicle of field generals, strategists, and occasional cannon fodder, James writes with piercing insight about the men who hold what may be the most important spot in the dugout. For nearly forty years, James has led the vanguard of how we measure the game. From sabermetrics to his Baseball Abstracts, James has influenced even the casual fan all the way up to the top brass. Somewhere in the middle of that spectrum, however, is the manager, and Bill James has penned a guide on some of the most innovative and renowned men to ever hold that position. Some of the game’s greatest managers have been Hall of Fame players who put down a bat and picked up a lineup card: Frank Robinson, Mel Ott, Joe Cronin, Tris Speaker, and Rogers Hornsby. Others have achieved greatness from their ability to assemble legendary teams: Billy Martin, Tommy Lasorda, Connie Mack, Joseph McCarthy, Dick Williams, and Leo Durocher. Here, Bill James explores the history of the manager, and its evolution from 1870–1990, in a decade-by-decade chronicle, examining the successes, the failures, and what baseball fans can learn from both. The Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers is a thought-provoking, entertaining, and seminal guide to a vital part of the national pastime, written by one of its most groundbreaking iconoclasts. “A delightful collection that will satisfy baseball fans of all ages.” —Library Journal

"This delightfully written, lesson-laden book deserves a place of its own in the Baseball Hall of Fame." —Forbes Moneyball is a quest for the secret of success in baseball. In a narrative full of fabulous characters and brilliant excursions into the unexpected, Michael Lewis follows the low-budget Oakland A's, visionary general manager Billy Beane, and the strange brotherhood of amateur baseball theorists. They are all in search of new baseball knowledge—insights that will give the little guy who is willing to discard old wisdom the edge over big money.

Since he first began publishing his Baseball Abstracts in the 1980s, Bill James has constantly challenged conventional wisdom by asking simple questions like, "Is that really true?" or "What if we looked at the question this way?" He has sparked a virtual revolution in the way the game of baseball is understood and played, from how players are evaluated or positioned to whether or not they should attempt to bunt or steal a base. In Solid Fool s Gold James continues his lifelong work with new analyses of: Hot pitchers, clutch pitching, and "late career" players The predictability of RBI A better way to organize the minor leagues The 33 best starting rotations and the worst teams of all time The best pitching matchups of the 1980s (and 2010) How the "Expansion Time Bomb" will affect the Hall of Fame But it is not just baseball that draws James inquisitive eye. He discusses the growing expectation for tips and decreasing effectiveness of advertising; his new method for measuring rainfall; the counterproductive use of physical stop lights and red-light cameras; and the statistical inefficiencies of the federal Transportion Security Administration. James wonders how Buck O Neil would have related to his ancestor s cousin (Supreme Court Justice James Clark McReynolds), proposes whimsical rules for Olympic NASCAR Racing, and poeticizes about Ricky Weeks and WikiLeaks. He compares the chances of a particular-size town producing a Justin Verlander or a William Shakespeare, imagines Roger Maris apologizing in heaven for having beaten Babe Ruth s single-season home run record, and explains how to "battle expertise with the power of ignorance." As a bonus, he includes one of his seminal articles from The Bill James Baseball Abstract 1983 titled "The Law of Competitive Advantage" and looks at how it has held up over the intervening years.

"New essays, statistical profiles, and hidden "nuggets" from the man who revolutionized baseball analysis"--Cover