The Value Of The Abstracts

A few thoughts on the extremely difficult to find original Bill James Baseball Abstracts

The Value Of The Abstracts

We’ve made it to the 1980 Bill James Baseball Abstract.

As usual, we’ll be using the summary by Rich Lederer, since the originals are impossible to find. Even the reprinted versions are extremely rare and valuable. There was a complete run of the reprinted versions of the 1977 through 1981 Abstracts on eBay a few months ago for around $2,000, but it seems the auction came down after it never sold.

I’m actually somewhat confused about why the original five volumes were never reprinted or scanned again. I do know that the books are pretty big: as Lederer reports,

It takes a while to scan 20 pages, let alone 120 or 200 or whatever. And it’s also not easy to scan homemade publications like this one without potentially destroying the original.

Anyway, out of curiosity, I took a quick glance for sold listings on eBay. What I saw kind of surprised me:

A few things to note:

• There aren’t enough sales to get a good idea of just how much the original versions are worth. eBay goes back 3 months; there was a grand total of one sold copy of the 1980 Abstract, 2 original copies of the 1981 Abstract, and a copy of the reprint version of the 1981 Abstract sold in that time.

• There aren’t a ton of people buying these. That 1981 Abstract wound up with only 1 bidder - surprising when you consider how scarce the publication is. In other words, if you happen to have one of these and want to sell, your best bet is to either arrange a private sale or figure out some way to draw wider attention to your auction.

• Because these are so rare, and because the demand for them seems to be all over the place, it’s going to be hard for us to figure out if there are interesting contents that we don’t know about yet.

Let me give you an example. Here’s a photo from a current auction for the 1978 Abstract (with a buy it now price of $7,000, which I doubt will ever happen):

I don’t know about you, but I’m actually really interested in seeing how James calculated park factors for the Kingdome - a park that I remember people calling the “homer dome” in the early 1990s.

And here’s a brief explanation of a baseball sim James designed for the 1977 Abstract from this auction listing:

I would absolutely love to read more - but, unfortunately, I have no way to read more. Unless I throw $1,000 at the auction, of course.

What do you think?