Much of life is clearly 'measurable'...
What's your salary? How much did your house cost? How many widgets did you produce today? What is Junior's GPA at State? The gas mileage for your van? Your cholesterol level? Your bowling average? Your IQ?...ad nauseam

But much of life is not so clearly 'measurable'...
How well do you kiss your lover? How good does your kid feel when you give her/him a hug? Why does the cat wiggle like that when you scratch his belly? Why is the sky blue? How does ice melt?...ad nauseam

Professional baseball mirrors this dichotomy.

Consider the clearly 'measurable'...
Luis Aparicio stole 56 bases in 1959. Lefty Grove won 31 games in 1931. Ty Cobb hit .420 in 1911. Willy Stargell hit 296 home runs in the 1970s.

This "just the facts, ma'am" type of 'measurable' is the currency of bar bets. The engine of call-in trivia shows on sports-talk radio stations. The forte of those who memorize grocery lists, birth dates of all their friends, and the chronological list of all the American Presidents.

These are not the 'measurables' that make baseball a life-long passion.

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Consider instead the not so clearly 'measurable'...
"Yogi Berra was a better catcher than Johnny Bench!"
"Oh yur nuts!!"

"The DH rule saved baseball"
"What!? The DH rule has almost ruined baseball! Thank God the National League hasn't caved yet!!"

"Don Mossi was the ugliest player ever!"
"Can't argue with that!...Let's have another drink!"

This back-and-forth tug of war between two friends, played out over over a couple of beers or engaged in by acquaintances on a message board, is the lifeblood of true baseball passion. This is grabbing your passion for baseball and giving it a hug or scratching its belly to see what you uncover today. And many more tomorrows.

This type of 'measurable' is delivered by this book.

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The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract is not an erudite collection of tables, numbers and charts with dust blowing out of the corners as each page is turned. This Abstract is an extended conversation with a friend about the many facets of baseball, conversations that re-create flesh-and-blood men and dangerous teams from the dry statistics of yesterday. This Abstract is the history of baseball brought to life...as if a time machine had dumped you back at Ebbet's Field for the '48 home opener. "Can you smell the peanuts? How about a beer? Man, look at all these classic cars!"

Bill James was simply a fan of baseball who happened to write, like so many here at Epinions.com. In the late '70s, he started publishing his "Baseball Abstracts", home-made, photo-copied collections of his observations about the 'state-of-baseball' that winter and spring. As fans anticipated, and bought, each yearly 'abstract', his cottage industry bloomed. In 1982, the "Bill James Baseball Abstract" was published as a national product. This Abstract was built on the success of those yearly abstracts. I still remember looking for those abstracts each spring in the early '80s.

With this Abstract, first copyrighted in 1985, Bill James produced an instant baseball book classic. It was soon recognized by SABR, the Society for American Baseball Research, as one of the top 50 baseball books of all time. This Abstract has withstood tough analysis of James' theories over the last 15 years.

The Abstract is divided into three main sections.

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Section I: The Game...
...divides the history of professional baseball into ten-year segments. A short introduction is followed by chapters covering each decade from the 1870s through the 1980s.

Each chapter, or 'decade' has several common elements discussed across the time span of the years. These include:

--How the game was played.--
These sections include comments about rule changes, new equipment first introduced, comments about lively or dead balls, observations about the value of scoring runs versus preventing runs from scoring, the value of home runs vs high batting averages versus stolen bases. All the discussions are based on his personal observations and research. All reflect his careful analysis of both the statistics of baseball and the contemporary accounts of the play of major league baseball.

--Where the game was played.--
These sections, usually brief, track the movement of the game across the country as population centers grew and America's population density shifted toward the Western United States. At least one decade's comment is so brief as to say only "S.O.C. (same old cities.)"

--Who the game was played by--
These sections trace the evolution of the groups that played the game. From the generally uneducated players in the early decades through the Irish of the 1890s, the entrepreneurs of the early 1900s, the "shysters, con men, carpet baggers, drunks and outright thieves" of the teen years, the country boys of the 1920s, eventually leading to the breaking of the color barrier in the 1950s and the influx of Latin players in the 1960s.

Each 'decade' also contains several recurring articles or features. These include:

--Checking In / Checking Out--
Notes notable births and deaths in the decade, both baseball and non-baseball. For instance the 1900s decade notes the birth of "Charles Lindbergh, Detroit", in 1902. It also notes the death of one "William McKinley, gunshot, age 58", in 1902. And there are baseball people also.

--The (decade) In a Box--
This section pays homage to the traditional statistics of baseball but stands them on their head. These include best and worst team records, not just for a season but for the entire decade. Similar records for home runs, pitching wins, etc. are provided are provided in this same whimsical manner.

James also adds many other 'facts' or 'statistics'. Just a few I'll mention include the heaviest player, the ugliest player, the best-looking player, best baseball books, 'a very good movie could be made about...', most-admirable superstar, least-admirable superstar (For the 1970s these 'superstars were Willie Stargell and Reggie Jackson. Any doubt who was 'most'? Who was 'least'?), drinking men, best World Series, worst World Series, and on and on. Each decade will provide hours of thought and debate.

Still other sections include:
--Nicknames in the (decade)--
From the 1930s section:
"Let's make an all-star team...Gimpy, Wimpy, Blimp, Stinky, Inky, Pinkie, Rowdy Richard, Twitchy, Snooker, Ducky Wucky."
--Uniforms of the (decade)--
Tracks changes in material, design, styling, etc.
--New strategies of the (decade)--
Did the home run increase in importance? Speed a bigger factor in winning in this decade? How about stolen bases? etc., etc.
--Parks of the (decade)--
What new parks were built, what old parks passed into history?
--And many more!!--

Throughout each decade chapter are sprinkled sidebar articles about unusual players, occurrences, trends, minor league teams, etc., etc., etc.

I apologize for the repeated use of the etcetera, but this section of the book is full of little treats that delight at each turn of the page. This section of the Abstract could stand alone as a valuable book.

But wait, there is more!!

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Section II: The Players...
...takes the reader into Bill James' system of analyzing the 'production' of a player on the field of play. In that process an "Offensive won-lost Record" and a "Gross Value" are derived for each player included in this section. (These will be described as we continue.)


--Introduction--
The intent of James is not to see how many HRs or doubles or stolen bases or walks or errors were produced by a player. But "how many runs resulted from all of these things?" That is, 'how many Runs Created' were produced?

--Reference Points--
His shortest 'sub-chapter' yet. Just a page and one-half briefly noting previous writers who have compiled lists of 'Top 100' or 'Greatest Baseball Players' that he uses as one of his benchmarks for his system. He also acknowledges the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY as perhaps the most popular benchmark against which players are measured.

--Runs Created--
OK, James is getting serious with his math. He reasserts his basic premise that the value of a ballplayer is best measured by the number of "runs created" by that player. He then proceeds to demonstrate that by using his formula, the "runs created" by a team over a season will be very close to that predicted by applying his formula to both the team season statistics and the individual team statistics. Essentially all the individual statistics combine in a predictable manner to predict larger patterns and outcomes.

He work begins at a simple "runs created" formula of:

[(H + W) X (TB)] / (AB + W) or...
[(Hits + Walks) X (Total Bases)] / (At Bats + Walks)

From this he continually factors in various other measured statistics to refine his formula and increase its accuracy of predicting actual "runs created". He eventually winds up with 14 "Tech" formulas that he applies to various seasons over the past 100 years. Various "Tech" formulas were created because the basic statistics recorded each year for each league could and did change from year to year, decade to decade.

An example of the more complex formulas is this one, used for the American League seasons of 1940 through 1950 and both the American and National League seasons of 1951 through 1953:

(H + W + HBP - CS - GIDP)
plus
TB + [0.26 X (TBB + HBP)] + [.52 X (SH + SF +SB)]
all divided by
(AB + W + HBP + SH + SF)

Don't even ask what all the abbreviations are. Just look at it with you mouth slightly ajar--as you would the engine of an F-16. With no comprehension, just awe. Thank God for modern computers and spreadsheet programs.

Then remember that James was compiling and testing these formulas in the early 1980s, before the arrival of the ubiquitous PC. I hope he had some time-share somewhere on a mainframe.

--Beyond Runs Created--
Three additional factors beyond 'creating runs' are considered in this section.

----A. Offensive Context----
The number of 'runs created' by a player will have a widely varying value depending on the ballpark the player plays in, the position he plays, the scoring level for his league that season and other factors. Winding his way through and around these factors and more, James eventually boils the 'runs created' and 'outs' a player is responsible for into a 'runs per game' figure which is then applied against his teams' records over his career. Each player winds up with a won-lost record that 'corrects' for the quality of the teams he has played on and, for the purpose of this book, allows him to be directly compared to players across the span of professional baseball history.

----B. Defense----
James argues that ...there are consistencies within defensive statistics which show they are not random or meaningless events. In his evaluation of players in this section he applies defensive statistics only for the position which they are considered.

----C. Gross Value----
Yet another James innovation, this is "...simply a 'count' of the number of positive things the player has done for his team..." For a season this is the players "approximate value." For his career, this number is his "gross value", a summation of his approximate values for each year played. This number has nothing to do with 'runs created' but simply measures everything positive that a player does during his season and over his career. Unfortunately, James gives the reader no information on what specifically is measured or how it is valued. A 'gross' disservice to the interested reader.

--An Unavoidable Concern--

"When you ask who is a greater player than whom, do you want to know which one was more valuable at some moment in his career, or do you want to know which was more valuable over the course of his career?"

To satisfy James, you must absolutely define your list of greatest players couched in the terms of "at some moment" (i.e. peak value) or "over the course" (i.e. career value) of a career.

Some players will have long careers filled with some seasons of brilliance and many more of great, good, average or even poor performance. Others will have shorter careers with perhaps more brilliant peak years but lacking the sustained good or average years of the first player. James uses a line graph analogy where the first player has higher spikes in the graph of his career while the second player has a greater area under the line in the graph of his career.

Bottom line? Greatness can be measured in different ways.

In this section, James ranks selected players both by peak value and by career value. Cleverly avoiding having to make a declaration of which method he would use. While providing additional 'hot-stove season' debate material.

--A Subjective Record--
Despite the appeal of using "just the facts, ma'am" information to rank players, James stresses the intimate knowledge that the peers and contemporaries of any player have of that player's strengths and weaknesses. Fellow players, managers, sports-writers, fans, all can speak to the ability of a player by measuring their daily and seasonal observations of that player against observations of his peers.

"That is why I have tried, in writing this book, to pay careful attention to how players were regarded, not after the fact, but in their own time."

A valuable resource that he finds to measure this "in their own time" support for each player are two player awards, the best known being the Most Valuable Player, MVP, award. The other being the Gold Glove award (for fielding excellence).

It is also in this section, that James notes the exclusion from his ranking of players from the nineteenth century and players from the Negro Leagues. He notes that the evidence needed to 'measure' the players of each group is simply not available.

"So we just have to consider these players, like the great stars of Japan,...to be off the charts, not below these players but beside them, on some other list."

The Abstract then proceeds with individual sections for each position. I will list the sections/positions in the order they appear in the book and will follow each with the player James assigns the highest "peak" and "career" value


Position.....................Peak Value...........Career Value
--Catcher.....................R. Campanella.......Y. Berra
--First Base.................L. Gehrig................L. Gehrig
--Second Base.............J. Morgan..............E. Collins
--Third Base.................M. Schmidt............M. Schmidt
--Shortstop..................H. Wagner.............H. Wagner
--Left Field...................S. Musial...............S. Musial
--Center Field...............M. Mantle..............T. Cobb
--Right Field.................B. Ruth..................B. Ruth
--Multi-Position Stars....H. Killebrew............P. Rose
--Pitcher
Right-Handed Starters...W. Johnson...........W. Johnson
Left-Handed Starters......L. Grove................L. Grove
Relief Pitchers...............B. Sutter...............R. Fingers

(Such is the 'power' of baseball that each of these players is identifiable to even a casual fan by their last name only. Of course James' pick for each position is open for debate. That is what the Abstract is all about!)

In each of these sections, James discusses a varying number of players, ranging from just 4 Multi-Position Stars to 30 to 40 players in some of the other sections. Each player has basic information listed at the intro to his discussion paragraphs(s): Hall of Fame member, data in Section III (explained later), Offensive Won-Lost Record and Gross Value. Many have a Comparable Recent Player listed. This info is followed by a discussion of any observations regarding that player and his career or specific highlights. These observations serve as articles in which James discusses anything that piques his interest. Some players have no additional discussion and others have several (or many!) pages of discussion.

In Stan Musial, for example, James details his study that found Musial was the player who received the most "MVP Award Shares" over his career. "MVP Award Shares" ?? A Bill James invention that tallies total votes for MVP over a player's career. Which he claims gives recognition for years they did not win the MVP award but finished with some measure of support.

These individual position/player sections are an eclectic collection of what's important, interesting or just plain fun to Bill James. Very interesting.


James finishes this section by listing:

--The 100 Greatest Players of This Century--
The top ten, by peak and career value as described above, are:

Player...........Peak.....................Career
1...................B. Ruth..................B. Ruth
2...................H. Wagner..............H. Wagner
3...................M. Mantle...............L. Grove
4...................L. Grove.................S. Musial
5...................S. Koufax...............H. Aaron
6...................L. Gehrig................T. Cobb
7...................W. Johnson............L. Gehrig
8...................J. Morgan...............W. Mays
9...................S. Musial................T. Williams
10.................T. Williams.............W. Spahn

James skews his selections by arbitrarily arranging them by position and pitchers into 'teams' of 12 to 14 players as he progresses down his list. I am hard-pressed to see any gross injustices that this causes on his lists.

The final 'chapter' of this section lists home and road batting averages for a dozen Hall of Fame players (with no accompanying text). Perhaps they are 'tied' to a discussion somewhere in the book but there is no explanation of why they are here and I do not remember their purpose. A mystery to me.

Keep going, there is SCADS more !!

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Section III: The Records...
...To quote James' opening comments:

"This now becomes a reference book."

James lists the three basic reference sources (at the time of his writing) for information about players from the past. They were: The Baseball Encyclopedia, from Macmillan; the Sports Encyclopedia: Baseball, from Grossett and Dunlap; and Daguerreotypes, from the The Sporting News.

The Macmillan reference is a comprehensive 'just-the-facts-ma'am' source. The Sports Encyclopedia contains essentially the same information but organizes it by years and teams. A short season synopsis is given of each season. Daguerreotypes presents far fewer players but gives more detailed information including trades, unusual game performances and personal information.

James uses his "reference book" to document perhaps 200 players with more information than any of the sources he cites. Every-day players are sorted by position. Pitchers--right-handed, left-handed, reliever--are grouped together.

Because James uses the basic standard information available in the above three sources, I will note only what original information he presents. For each player chart he provides career figures where applicable. He also breaks down these career figures into a 'typical season' of 162 games for positions players and 40 starts for pitchers. 162 games and 40 starts are used because they closely represent what the present day fan might consider a 'normal, complete season'.

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For position players, the data/information includes:
--Batting--
All the usual plus...
Home and Road home runs.

This information is invaluable for deciding/debating whether a given player was helped or hurt by his home park 'friendliness' (or lack of it) for HR hitters.

--Baserunning--
All the usual plus...
GIDP or ground into double play, intentional walks, hit batsmen, sacrifice hits, sacrifice flies, and caught stealing.

This enables minor corrections for players who appear equal in the 'usual' categories. James uses this information to show that using basic information two players might each create 80 runs. By factoring in the additional information, one now creates 71 runs and the other 90 runs. One is now a below-average performer and the other would have an offensive winning percentage of .616. The two players were Ted Simmons and Joe Morgan. Care to guess which player went up and which went down? (Hint: Look at the lists above.)

--Percentages--
The usual plus...
On-base percentage.

On-base percentage is absolutely necessary for predicting how many runs a player or team is likely to score.

--Values--
All Bill James created originals...
Runs created, offensive wins, offensive losses, offensive winning percentage, and approximate value.

All these have been explained earlier in the book, and in this review. James notes that the offensive winning percentage

"...creates a constant reference point--a .500 offensive performer is always average, a .600 player is always good, a .700 player is always excellent, and an .800 player is always great."

A few examples? Ted Williams - .857, Babe Ruth - 0.851, Hank Aaron - .744.

--Fielding--
James presents only the fielding information for the position for which the player is being considered. Range factors are his only new contribution.

--Notes--
Miscellaneous information including...

The teams the player was on, presented here only because, as James puts it, "...we were pressed for space in the charts." I imagine so, given the amount of information he is adding!

Additional 'notes' include performance of the player in MVP voting, any information on salaries that he happened to collect, explanation of gaps in a player's career due to injury or suspension, and any other specific tidbit that he feels worthy of calling to the reader's attention.

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James also presents additional data on pitchers in this section. Again, I will note only his new, original information.

--How much he pitched--
Additional information he has gleaned and presents includes...

Games finished and batters facing pitcher.

--What he gave up--
The usual plus...

Runs allowed, home runs surrendered, sacrifice hits allowed, sacrifice flies allowed, hit batsmen, intentional walks, wild pitches, and balks.

--What the results were--
The usual is wins, losses and winning percentage.


The rest is pure James. He presents...

--Rest of team--
Gives the team winning percentage in games which he did not have a decision.

--Above team--
Calculates the increased (or decreased) number of games he won based on his above team percentage. "Cy Young over his career was 103 wins better than the teams for which he pitched."

--Runs per game--
Comparable to a pitchers ERA (earned run average) except all runs count. James considers the distinction between earned and un-earned runs to be "silly and artificial, a distinction having no meaning..." And I would agree with him.

--Percentage of league--
A measure of the pitchers run average per game divided by the league's run average per game for a given season. A figure above 1.000 usually indicates a losing record. Only the greats usually approach .500. All the pitchers covered in this book are below 1.000 for their careers.

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The second edition of the Abstract concludes with:

A brief Notes on the Second Edition where James thanks everyone for their help in correcting mistakes, relating stories, providing additional facts or background and generally helping in any way.

A Glossary of Terms in use in sabermetrics that define many of the terms that James uses in the text.

A Bibliography that contains a hundred-plus baseball related titles. Surely a few gems among these!

An Index which includes indication of pages containing illustrations.

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So that's all real nice, but what did YOU think of the book, errrr... Abstract ??

This Abstract will be a constant companion for any true baseball fan. It can be opened to any page and the reader will find something he has not thought of before. Usually not a fact or a statistic but usually a different way of looking at a stat, or a new understanding of why something is perceived as it is. Sometimes you really do feel as if "you are there".

You probably won't win any bar bets by reading this book. But you will 'think circles' around your friends.

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What's wrong with this book ?
Well, it is somewhat dated. Has it really been nearly ten years since George Brett last played? But the 1950s were a long time ago. Whether today is 1985 or 2002.

As mentioned in the review, James does a poor job of explaining how "Gross Value" is calculated.

It has been supplanted by "The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract". With that book running 998(!) pages compared to 723 for this Abstract. I knew I could get the number of pages in here.

That's about it. Buy and love this book !!

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Disclaimers by the Author of this review
The text of the Abstract contains numbering and ordering that does not correspond to the Table of Contents. I chose to use the ordering of the ToC.

Recommended: Yes