Baseball Lit 101

The New BILL JAMES Historical Baseball Abstract of 2001 revises his previous Abstract; it’s a 1012 page compendium of data through the 1999 season. He covers every aspect of the game except the history of hotdogs. A 27 page Index! A ton of stuff you want to know.

First there is the history of baseball from the beginning, as well as the history of the Negro Leagues. Mr. James does this by decades. Some his most interesting beliefs center on what is wrong with the game again, by decade. They game is too long, the stadiums are old and in horrible parts of a town with scary parking lots. Batters take too many times outs and the pitcher throws to first far too often. New York teams have dominated the game for years. Yuck! The worst problem is that there is no leadership and the economic disparity between teams can be solved – by dividing the monies gained from TV contracts equally – and still this has not been done.

He has many ways of ranking teams and players, and the ones I love most, and I believe I am not alone, are the 100 best players of all time by position. The regular stats – at bats, hits, slugging percentage, strikeouts, walks, ERA, et alia., however, don’t cut it for Mr. James. They do not tell the whole story. He has devised Win Shares, a score that deconstructs “THE BATTLE TO GET TO THE OBVIOUS” – who was the best? And who was the worst? He summarizes them by asking:

“What is missing from this picture?
What is distorted here, and what is accurately portrayed?
How can we show what has been left out?
How can we correct what has been distorted?”

We are on page 339 and have about 700 pages of answers to get through.

Checking out my statistical manuals – I have a BA in Psychology – I see that James uses the discipline of statistics for two purposes: describing sets of data in terms of graphs which demonstrate middleness (mean, median, mode), and of spread (range, variance, standard deviation). That a distribution can be symmetrical or skewed and how a skew changes the middleness. He also shows how two sets of data can be related, and how a score can be predicted by an individual’s score on a related variable, using something called the standard error of the estimate to indicate the amount of “play” in that prediction. He finds a correlation coefficient on data made up of ranks instead of measurements.

He also uses inferential statistics which means using a set of observable information to make inferences about larger groups that can’t be observed. Sound too boring? Mr. James explains his methods in a general way that is not threatening. And most of the book is the result of close observations that he has made in order to create his rankings. The results are not only enlight-ening, they entertain us. The Statistical abstract is a keeper. James has used statistics to interpret baseball’s collective dreams and they are ours, too, because we love the game.

Another Milestone
Karl Malden died last week at the age of 96. He was quite a tall Serbian with a huge nose who acted in at least 75 movies, usually with great hamminess. The man was a deli unto himself. He was a second banana in two great movies directed by Elia Kazan, On the Waterfront and Streetcar Named Desire. He appeared in it on Broadway, along with Marlon Brando – the one and only Stanley.

But the film I remember best for Malden’s work is Fear Strikes Out, from Jimmy Pearsall’s own biography, directed by Robert Mulligan, and also starring Tony Perkins. Piersall played baseball well as a boy in Waterbury, CT. But he never satisfied the demands of his father, portrayed by Malden. He’d practice in the mornings and the afternoons every day. No matter how many hits he got, how many good catches and throws he made, he was never good enough for Dad.

Piersall made the Red Sox and he seems happy. But Dad keeps the criticism going, attending games and conducting post mortems as if Jimmy has died. His father never cuts him any slack and never praises him. He erodes Jimmy’s psyche to a terrible breaking point. During one of the games he became uncontrollably psychotic. This scene is wonderful. Remember, this is the Tony Perkins who made Psycho such a great movie. He was practicing bigtime in Fear Strikes Out. But his suffering appears realistic – you’ve known from the get-go that Dad is a certified sadist. That kind of character was Malden’s forte anyway. You know, the guy who appears to be a really good person but does such horrible things at home. In a long period of psychiatric care Piersall finds that he has striven more to please his father than himself. He decides he can no longer see him, which his Dad cannot understand.

Piersall was talented; he played in the outfield from 1950 to 1967 in Boston and Cleveland. Looking him up in Bill James’ Abstract I find that he rates Piersall the 92nd best center fielder ever. He has also the tenth lowest rate of errors as a left fielder. And he had an ongoing friendship with Jack Kennedy. Where else can you find these facts? Don’t you want to own the Abstract? I do.


At Last…My Love Has Come Along
Phew! The season starts on March 31st for us when the Phillies welcome the Nats to Citizens Bank Park. I’ll be able to check Paul Lo Duca out again, and he’ll probably need attention. Since it’s a home game I won’t have to look at the Phillies’ new road uniforms with that dark green top. Omigod! Dark green? That was always the color of Dad’s leather club chairs, my mother’s sofa, prep school hockey jumpers and the mattes on duck prints all over America. A Forties color actually, that I haven’t seen since then. But Retro is in, as we know.

The real reason I can’t wait for the season to start is that I won’t have to mute all the drug commercials. The new Bud Lites are coming; the new Bud Lites are coming! I’ll be there.