If you're a baseball fan and you haven't read anything by Mr. James or at least heard of him, shame, shame on you. Indeed, more than any other writer or any student of the game, Bill James has truly revolutionized how we view and analyze this great game, seeking to find new ways to find value in players by relying hard statisics instead of small subjective sample sizes. Although he has not been universally accepted or praised, many old schoolers (narrow-minded, crusty bastards) deride his unique brand of baseball analysis, for the most part his approach has been widely embraced by the baseball community, to the point that he is currently employed by the Boston Red Sox to help on personel decisions. Yet he still has managed to find time to continue writing, whether that be on his website billjamesonline.com (subscription only) or his annual book, now in the form of the Goldmine. Surveying the 2008 season for all 30 teams, James gives you the kind of insight and progressive thinking about baseball that you can't get anywhere else, looking at things people never looked at before giving the reader a fresh take on this great game.
No matter what team you're a fan of, Bill has something for every team and everybody can appreciate, chock full of all kinds of essays and stats that you'd never think of. Here's a few gems from the book that gives you an idea of how in depth Bill goes.
BillFact: Nobody got busted inside in 2008 more than Alex Rodriguez. Gold Mine stats show that pitchers threw off the plate and inside on A-Rod 353 times — that’s about 15.4% of the time or one every 6 1/2 pitches or so. That’s about normal. In 2007, pitchers busted A-Rod inside 337 times, and in 2006 they busted him 327 times. My suspicion is that thinking is two-fold. (1) As baseball announcers like to say, you don’t want to let A-Rod “get his arms extended.” (2) A-Rod is just the sort of guy you kind of feel like you need to bust inside.
BillFact: When you see Evan Longoria pull a fly ball to left field … that’s is usually a really good thing. Longoria has hit 52 fly balls to left field in his career — 26 of those went over the fence for home runs. Pitchers might want to avoid pitching inside to Longoria.*
*And, in fact, pitchers HAVE tried to avoid throwing inside to Longoria — they have thrown only 11 pitches to him inside and off the plate so far this year. Longoria is like the anti-A-Rod.
*And, in fact, pitchers HAVE tried to avoid throwing inside to Longoria — they have thrown only 11 pitches to him inside and off the plate so far this year. Longoria is like the anti-A-Rod.
indeed, where else are you going to find such a fine touch of analysis like this? This kind of research and insight is pretty much unique to Bill, everyone else out there is basically just trying to copy his style.
But even more than his adept research it is his prose that makes his works so memorable. With an easy to read casual style with a healthy dose of humor and irony, Bill presents his work in a way that is just simply enjoyable to read. Sure he's a guy who's taking the studying of the game to a new level, but at his heart he's a guy who loves baseball, who can never get enough and who is constantly trying to better understand its beauty and grace.
Its not a terribly long book and you can pretty much pick it up at any point and in only a few pages come to appreciate why this man has become so influential and so revered in the game of baseball. I highly reccommend this or any other book he has out, my favorite is tome the Historial Abstract, but anything you can get your hands on by Bill James will enrich your baseball viewing experience and give you greater insight than ever before.
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