The Last Thing Left To Believe In

Esquire: The Baseball Years

The Last Thing Left To Believe In

As you might know, I’ve spent a little bit of time over the past few months going over the snippets of old Bill James articles I’ve been able to find.

A number of them come from old issues of Esquire, and were reprinted in the collection This Time Let’s Not Eat The Bones.

Well, as luck would have it, I’ve been able to find complete copies of those magazines. And, yes, that means we can look at more than just snippets of what Bill James had to say about teams seemingly selected at random.

There’s more than just James in these magazines, too, by the way. The 1979 edition, which was near the end of Esquire’s ill advised twice-a-month era, featured a number of articles that are absolutely worth reading besides the James preseason predictions.

Maybe this will help whet your appetite:

Page 6

This isn’t only interesting because the young James looks so much different than he does now (though he still had that Jerry Garcia beard, of course). It’s fascinating because this issue was really Bill James bursting out on the big scene.

The story I’ve heard is that somebody at Esquire was an early fan of the Baseball Abstract series, which is what got James a kind of foot in the door into the world of big journalism. Though I’m not convinced that I envy James for what happened to him (after all, there is a reason he stopped publishing The Baseball Abstract after 1988), it’s going to be a lot of fun to go through this slowly and relive the way things once were.

There are a lot of databases and archives out there with cool stuff that documents the history of sabermetrics, by the way. Some bloggers have written about this in the past, though, honestly, most people skip it and go straight for whatever shiny new object we’ve got today. I’ve got all the time in the world, however, and I’m more than happy to take a trip back to early 1979 to see how the world looked from that point of view.

And, of course, it’s fitting that the beginning of this article includes a reference to The Universal Baseball Association. That should be required reading for anybody with an interest in baseball simulation — and it’s a book that I really should reread. Look for more on that in the future.