Revisiting Bill James
Time for another new project
Revisiting Bill James
I’ve decided to go for yet another large project.
I had the good fortune to purchase a complete run of the old Bill James Baseball Abstracts the other day. These range from 1982 through 1988.
I’m going to go through them slowly, and will look for topics to cover in this blog.
I’m not sure if I’ll find a lot or not. I’m also going to try to work in a few tidbits about the history of sabermetrics, and plan on expanding things a little bit. For example, it will be important to talk about Pete Palmer and The Hidden Game of Baseball when we get to that point.
Covering Older Stuff
To begin, however, I’m going to see what I can find about the old 1977-1981 era of the Bill James Baseball Abstract.
As you probably already know, those hand created publications are almost impossible to find, even in reprinted form. A recent eBay search led me to only one of the 5:
It’s not exactly something that was built to last, and this auction is already sitting at $200 with about half a week to go.
The seller notes in the description just how rare this is:
Now, I’d argue that the bit about Billy Beane and Moneyball is completely oversimplified, but that’s another note for another time. The fact that the Online Computer Library Center shows basically no holdings of any of these volumes gives you an idea of just how rare they are.
Sadly, nobody has scanned any of these pages that I’m aware of. In other words, unless you are one of the few lucky enough to own one of these incredibly rare newsletters, you’re probably never going to be able to read them.
The closest thing we have is this series on Baseball Analysts.
And it’s old. It appears that Rich Lederer started this series in 2004, though I believe it may have existed on another blog before Baseball Analysts. He also links to Baseball Primer threads discussing his posts. Unfortunately, those threads appear to have evaded archiving by the Internet Archive.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t work through things. I’ll go through Rich’s now obscure blog posts and will let you know when I find something interesting.
The 1982 to 1988 run of Abstracts isn’t rare, of course. Ballentine Books printed many copies, although I should note that the 1982 and 1983 versions tend to attract relatively high prices at auction.
Anyway, we’ll see how far I get with this series. Let me know what you think.
