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« Back to Bill James, Beyond Baseball main page    Transcript for: Bill James, Beyond BaseballTHINK TANK WITH BEN WATTENBERG#1322 Bill James, Beyond Baseball FEED DATE: JULY 28, 2005 Bill James Opening Billboard: Funding for Think Tank is provided by... (Pfizer) At Pfizer, we’re spending over five billion dollars looking for the cures of the future. We have 12,000 scientists and health experts who firmly believe the only thing incurable is our passion. Pfizer, life is our life’s work. Additional funding is provided by the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. Hello I’m Ben Wattenberg... In the last few years, the success of teams like the LA Dodgers, the Oakland A’s, and of course the miraculous Boston Red Sox has been credited to a new scientific way of looking at baseball. It’s called Sabermetrics, and It is changing the way we look at baseball and professional sports. How does it work? And are there wider implications beyond the world of sports? To Find Out, Think Tank is joined by... Bill James, Senior Baseball Operations Advisor with the Boston Red Sox and author of many books including The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract and The Neyer/James Guide to Pitchers. The Topic Before the House: Beyond Baseball, This Week on Think Tank WATTENBERG: Bill James, welcome to Think Tank. JAMES: Thank you for having me. WATTENBERG: Delighted to have – to have you. Tell me first a little bit about your life...where you were born, when you wrote your books and so on. JAMES: I come from Kansas. I grew up in a small town in Kansas, went to the University of Kansas and I started writing, I guess, in the mid 1970s just because I didn’t know it was impossible. WATTENBERG: (Laughs) JAMES: And the – I wrote the first Baseball Abstract in 1977 and realized I hadn’t done a very good job with that one so I decided I’d try it again and after these – this many years I’m still trying to get it right. WATTENBERG: How many books have you written so far? JAMES: About 20. WATTENBERG: About 20. Let me – let me first say that I – the two that I read I really loved. I mean, it was like meeting old friends sometimes ‘cause it goes back into the past of baseball history and I’ve been sort of one of these on again, off again baseball fans. I mean, I remember my two favorite books as a kid were Jack London’s The Call of the Wild and a book about the St. Louis Cardinals earlier – of an earlier time called The Gas House Gang and I must have read each of those books about fifty times. So it really is a kind of sport that can challenge – can challenge a kid and an adult, obviously. JAMES: J.Roy Stockton’s the Gas House Gang. The – he felt free to make of his characters larger than life figures in a way that they maybe weren’t but he had no reluctance about portraying them that way. I think that’s a – I always wonder if we’re missing something in that we are so careful now not to make people what they aren’t. WATTENBERG: There’s so much myth-building in life and in sports. I, as a future writer anyway, I remember in growing up in New York one of the favorites was Jimmy Cannon who was a wonderful – albeit I look back and he was sort of very over-dramatic, but he used to write columns about Joe DiMaggio that made it seem as if Joe DiMaggio walked on water; was just the greatest man in the world. And then a few years ago a book came out by Richard Ben Kramer about DiMaggio and it made him out as an absolutely, totally unpleasant man. JAMES: That’s right. And you wonder, are we better off for knowing or... I think everybody would choose to know, but in some ways you wouldn’t. WATTENBERG: It’s said that you have challenged the conventional wisdom in baseball. I wonder, why don’t you lay out for us what your thesis is about what we’ve been getting wrong about looking at baseball? JAMES: The – the first point is that I did not start with any thesis and even to say that I have a thesis is more somebody else’s perception than it is my own. I suppose I do and I’ll get to that in a moment, but I started by asking the question what is the connection between these numbers and winning. People think that they understand which numbers are... WATTENBERG: These numbers being batting averages, slugging percentages...all those statistical artifacts that come with baseball. JAMES: Right. And I – yes, I started with that question rather than with the thesis. When you start with that question, you say how important is speed to winning? Unfortunately, you reach the conclusion that it’s not very important at all. I mean, the best teams in the majors are no faster than the – the worst teams; in fact they’re slower. The – and some of the things that people have believed about what makes a winning team, ninety-five percent of them are true, no doubt. Five percent of them are false, so I then become identified with the five percent that I – of the traditional wisdom that I argue with. What’s important? If I have a thesis it’s that – I mean, you win games by scoring runs and preventing runs; you score runs by getting people on base. I mean how many runs a team scores is essentially a function of how many people they have on base. Other things count. Speed counts, running counts, moving runners counts, power counts but essentially how many runs you score and how many games you win comes from how many people you have on base. WATTENBERG: Therefore what? If we determine that the trick is to get on base, then for example you’re not saying that the homerun is a very important – people want to come see homeruns but it’s not terribly important as you see it. JAMES: Well, the whole – the power – power is very valuable and I don’t mean to minimize that at all. The – if you had to choose between power and speed, by all means choose power. The – but you can – you can win without power if you get enough people on base and the same way, you can without speed if you get enough people base. WATTENBERG: Okay. You wrote in one of the key quotes, “a hitter should be measured by his success in that which he is trying to do and that which he is trying to do is create runs, not compile a high batting average.” JAMES: Correct. WATTENBERG: So you think that the batting average, which is the first thing that normally comes to people’s mind who follow this at all is, “Oh, he hit 326. He’s really good.” That’s not the way you look at it. JAMES: That’s right. If you hit 326 you are really good. But there are people who hit 280 who are not good players. If you hit 280 and you don’t walk and you don’t have power and you don’t have speed, you won’t – your team will not win. There are players who hit 230 who are good players, so within that – I mean if you hit 180 you stink no matter what. If you hit 325, you can play no matter what. Within that medium range, batting average is overrated. WATTENBERG: One of the great clichés is that pitching is 90% of baseball. Do you buy that? JAMES: People will tell you that John McGraw said that baseball’s 90% pitching. John McGraw ridiculed the idea that baseball is 90% pitching and he explained very carefully and very logically that baseball was about 30% pitching, which was very – which is an accurate major at the time that he did this which was 1906. The – since 1906 pitching has become more important than it was then and defense has been squeezed a little bit. But still pitching is 35% of the game. WATTENBERG: If you’ve got a guy, a pitcher, thrown in smoke and you can’t – and getting the ball over the plate, you can’t do the other things that you’ve talked about which is get on base or it’s very hard. JAMES: The perfection in any area of the game will – will succeed. I mean, if you – if your whole offense is built out of Henry Aarons who can hit a 97 mile an hour fastball, then you don’t need pitching. If you have perfect pitching you don’t need hitting. And it’s true that any one element of the game can - can dominate the others if taken to an extreme. But the extreme case is not the typical case. In the typical case – in the typical case over the course of a season, success comes from a melding of all different types of abilities. The one most important of those is hitting. The – because the hitter has more control over the outcome of the event than anybody else does. WATTENBERG: You find that the ability of a batter to get on base via the walk – four balls... JAMES: Right. WATTENBERG...is the critical difference of that vast middle ground. Is that right? JAMES: That is correct. WATTENBERG: You talk about so called clutch hitters and if I understand it correctly, you find that these are all professionals; they all do over a period of time about what they’re expected to do. JAMES: The problem with clutch hitting is that no one can prove that such a scale exists at the major league level. And it would seem intuitively that if it existed, one would have to be able to prove that it existed. No one can. The – if you take the guys who hit best in the clutch in 2004 and look at how they hit in the clutch situations in 2005, there’s no – there’s no real carryover. It’s – other than the good hitters will be good, the bad hitters will be bad, but there’s no – there’s no proven predictability to being able to hit in clutch situations. The – therefore, some people have rushed to say that clutch hitting doesn’t exist. I don’t say it doesn’t exist. I just don’t know. Maybe, you know – maybe I have a Sasquatch breaking into my backyard at night. WATTENBERG: So you would believe, for example, that Joe DiMaggio’s famous fifty-six-game hitting streak was just a series of statistical artifacts. It’s just he was a good – good baseball player... a very good baseball player and the just happened to fall that way. JAMES: Well, I’m tempted to believe that but the problem with that argument is that Joe DiMaggio, when he was nineteen years old had a – a sixty-one-game hitting streak in the very good minor league baseball. So that damages the theory that this is just a – a random statistical artifact. The – and there may have – well have been something about DiMaggio’s nature that made it... WATTENBERG: I mean players do talk... all the time in every sport. JAMES: Right. WATTENBERG: That, “Boy, I’m really hot” or “I can’t buy a base hit. It’s terrible.” JAMES: Yes. Right. WATTENBERG: I mean and – and so that would – conceivably could have some – some effect. JAMES: It could, but the guy – they – you can’t prove a guy’s hot, either. I mean, the guys who are hot - if you look at the guys who have been red hot over the last week and look at how they hit tomorrow, they’re not going to hit any better than their normal ability. So that again appears to be a statistical artifact. WATTENBERG: All these theories that we’ve begun to explicate here has been called Sabermetrics. JAMES: Right. WATTENBERG: Who are the outstanding sabermetricians? JAMES: Craig Wright, Eddie Epstein, the – Ron Chandler. WATTENBERG: Now who - they are affiliated with teams or just with their own websites or both or... JAMES: Craig Wright has worked for teams and consults with teams several consulting contracts for many years. Eddie Epstein used to work with the Orioles and has consulted with teams. Ron Chandler works with the Cardinals. And there are many others. WATTENBERG: Given all these notions, how would you actually define Sabermetrics? JAMES: I keep switching definitions because I don’t like any of them. The best definition is the broadest one. Sabermetrics is the search for objective knowledge about baseball. We try to take the issues that baseball people argue about and submit them to rigorous tests. WATTENBERG: Statistics essentially. JAMES: Yes. The same as – as a – a economist would or a sociologist would or any other person of knowledge would. WATTENBERG: The first of the baseball general managers to put your Jamesian theories into work was Billy Bean. Is that accurate and what did he actually do in I guess scouting new players? JAMES: Well, my knowledge of all this is second hand or third hand because I don’t deal with them personally, but I think that Billy Bean inherited the practice – the sabermetric practices from Sandy Alderson, who actually was the general manager of Oakland twenty years ago and started using what we could call solid sabermetric practices. WATTENBERG: And again, he looked at the record and looked specifically for people who could get on base as opposed to being the big slugger or whatever. JAMES: That’s right. That’s right. WATTENBERG: And he did very well. JAMES: And they have done very well. Persistently. WATTENBERG: How do the old timers, the scouts who cover the country looking for raw talent for how strong they air and how far they can hit the ball and all that kind of stuff, what do they think about this – your theory of Sabermetrics, or THE theory of Sabermetrics? JAMES: The – I would think it’s probably safe to say that a great many of them are very skeptical about the – the whole idea. WATTENBERG: They still like a guy who can run like the blazes and throw the ball real hard? JAMES: They do and there are good reasons to do that and also sometimes they feel perhaps inappropriately threatened by the alternative approach I think that... WATTENBERG: That in other words they are being – they’re sort of ludites there being replaced by a machine called statistics. JAMES: Right. That’s right. Which actually is quite impossible. WATTENBERG: It’s quite impossible? JAMES: It’s quite impossible. There are too many things you can’t measure. WATTENBERG: Now, you were hired by another disciple of – of Sabermetrics, who you work for now, Theo Epstein. What is his actual job and what is your actual job? JAMES: The – Theo is the general manager of the Boston Red Sox and in theory I work for the leadership group of the Boston Red Sox including the owner, John Henry, and the president Larry Lucchino, as well as the general manager, Theo, but in practice 95% of my work is for Theo, so I work for Theo. WATTENBERG: In 2004 the Red Sox made that incredible comeback to break the so called curse of the bambino, what did Epstein and you actually do to help the Red Sox? JAMES: The – well, the players won it. I mean, the – in terms of what we – what we did to help the players, I mean we have a – we have a very good program of events scouting in place; we have a good program in place, too. We brought in players we thought would help and I think they did help. But what it - you know, the players won – won the World Series on their own. WATTENBERG: What has happened over the years in all sports, I guess, is the player’s salaries have been enormous – have jumped enormously. Now, does your theory, the Jamesian theory, Sabermetrics or whatever, does that tend to diminish the difference between a wealthy franchise and a poorer franchise? JAMES: Not in itself, no. The – the book Moneyball puts forward the idea that the... WATTENBERG: Which is basically about you – your theory. JAMES: Well, it’s basically about the Oakland A’s, but it puts forward the idea that the A’s were able to succeed by – by playing smart baseball with very little money and that they used my theories along with other things to do that. But knowledge favors people who have knowledge; it favors neither the wealthy nor the poor, so I don’t – I won’t – it’s not intrinsically true. WATTENBERG: You were quoted recently in the New York Times in a very refreshing way where you said that you had been wrong in some of your theories. JAMES: Right. WATTENBERG: And in fact in one of your books - in the book about pitching with Mr. Neyer, there are constant references to, “well, James thinks this but Neyer thinks he’s wrong and Neyer thinks this but James thinks he’s wrong.” These are all topics for argumentation I gather, or many of them are. JAMES: I would hope so. The Times piece focused on the clutch hitting issue as well as other things, that we – we were using a method that we thought should have detected clutch hitters if they existed and I studied and concluded that even if clutch hitters existed you wouldn’t find them by using this method. WATTENBERG: What were your emotions – I mean, there’s a very parochial question here in Washington ‘cause so many people are excited about the reemergence of a baseball club in – in Washington. Did Washington deserve a team? Are you glad it got it? I mean, it’s not in your league but it’s – it’s a national league club; not an American league. Was that sort of a great event for... JAMES: I’m very pleased to see baseball back in Washington. The – it’s my belief that baseball thrives by providing baseball to every major league city. And I think every major league city should have a major league team and – and I – I don’t – I don’t think that we gain by creating artificial surplus of cities. WATTENBERG: Now, it’s said that baseball is America’s pastime. Some writers, George Will, David Broder, others I think sort of go overboard about the great poetry of the diamond and the outfield and they go on and on. But is that still so? I mean, how do the attendance figures and in the television ratings, is it still valid? JAMES: It – looking at baseball itself, baseball has never been healthier. Attendance is fantastic; TV ratings are very good; the income is great. Looking at baseball compared to other sports, not so much. More – if asked what is the national sport, more people will say football than baseball. The – add their TV ratings for baseball, while they’re good, are not necessarily as good as basketball, the NCAA tournament or – or... WATTENBERG: It’s – it’s said, and I once wrote a column called “Snoreball” – it’s said that baseball is a boring game because – I mean you could take all of the action in a two-and-a-half-hour baseball game; the actual time the ball is in play is probably two or three minutes, if I’m – if I’m – if I’m guessing. Should or could the game be speeded up? JAMES: It could - could be and it should be. You could – you could - a game now lasts two-and-a-half hours and they’re working hard to cut that down and they’ve made some progress. But if you could get the unions out of the way, the – you could – you could... WATTENBERG: The player’s unions. JAMES: The player’s union and the umpire’s union. The – and the – and get the TV ads and that under control, you could very easily play a nine inning baseball game in – on average an hour and forty minutes and with just a few rule – small rules changes; so small that if somebody didn’t explain them to you, you couldn’t figure out what... WATTENBERG: Which would inherently make it more exciting. JAMES: Yes. WATTENBERG: I find it very interesting. I – I – let me start that again. I find it very interesting. I do a lot of writing, and have done over the years, about data and it is invariably so, and I mean invariably, that you can take the same data or various people can take the same data and interpret it in wholly different ways. And I mean, there’s one – the so called poverty rate - you can take it and say it’s how much cash do you earn and that’s the poverty threshold and if you’re above it you’re not in poverty. But you can also say well, you’ve got to count in food stamps ‘because that’s as good as cash and you got to count in rent supplements and you got to count in... and there’s a whole other bunch of things. You got to count in Medicaid. And then you get a much lower poverty rate. On the other hand, people who want to show that gee, America’s doing very poorly and they want to show the poverty rate is higher, they have a whole – and the Census Bureau publishes all of this stuff. But the length of poverty is higher and a lot of other things and of course you get into economics and it’s a zoo. I mean, there are so many numbers out there you can just... So my long question is, is data a good way of explaining life and the things – these objective things that we see about – about us? JAMES: The data is a limited way of explaining life. The essential property of the data is that it’s not real. It is an image of a reality that is always something else and in the same way as one can define poverty in different ways in the statistics, or anything in baseball, what you have in essence is a picture and you could take a picture of me from the front and a picture of me from the left and a picture of me from the back and you’d have very, very different pictures. The statistics are not – they’re a real thing; they are just a picture of something else. There is always a lot that’s left out of the picture and the biggest mistake that people who try to study baseball through the stats make is thinking that they – it’s confusing them with the real event. There’s always a tremendous amount that’s left out. What a lot of people don’t understand is that there are also things that you can see in the statistics that you can’t really see in any other way. So you have - you just have to balance those. WATTENBERG: Ok, on that note, Bill James thank you very much for joining us on Think Tank. And thank you, please remember to send us your comments via email; we think it makes our program better. For Think Tank, I’m Ben Wattenberg. Opening Billboard: Funding for Think Tank is provided by... (Pfizer) At Pfizer, we’re spending over five billion dollars looking for the cures of the future. We have 12,000 scientists and health experts who firmly believe the only thing incurable is our passion. Pfizer, life is our life’s work. Additional funding is provided by the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. Back to top  Think Tank is made possible by generous support from the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Donner Canadian Foundation, the Dodge Jones Foundation, and Pfizer, Inc. ©Copyright Think Tank. All rights reserved. 
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