Others say...

"Still at the top of the game"
I've been reading Bill James since 1983, and for years I anticipated his newest book. However, I approached the Gold Mine with trepidation, as I would an aging rock star who lost his chops. I didn't like the Bill James Handbook series at all because it was minutiae that didn't leave room for imagination nor wit.

However, this book returns to the best of Bill James: humor, unusual insights and ideas, social commentary, and sheer unpredictability. This book blazes so many new paths that it's impossible to decide where to go first, and you just sit there thinking, "Well, I hope all those smart sabermetricians follow up on the ideas that Bill has raised."



"Interesting, but disappointing"
This is another Bill James baseball book...but not really. It is more of an ad for Bill's new website than it is a book of baseball analysis. It is intersting; he has tidbits of items on each team. I was hoping for more analysis, and more of Bill's excellent writing. This is not another Baseball Abstract.

"There's gold in them thar pages"
When Bill James came out with his Baseball Abstracts in the early 1980s, I thought I had discovered forbidden fruit. For this first time, here were cogent numbers accompanied by scintillating commentary, the best of both world's for a fan. Each team's major players got their due, as James offered his "scouting reports" on their strengths and weaknesses. Each year seemed to get a little bigger and better and soon there were others who sought jump on the statistical/textual analysis train, including the Elias Baseball Analyst series, and The Scouting Report, which had several incarnations. James' work was often imitated but never duplicated in terms of quality.

James eventually turned to other book projects, applying his keen eye to the lore of the game in The Bill James Historical Abstract and Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame? among others. I didn't care much for his weighty volumes composed solely of charts, tables, and numbers. I leave that to the hard-core statheads. In addition to the books by James, there are several about him and his contribution to the way the game is viewed and enjoyed by everyone: fans, front office personnel, and broadcasters alike.

That said, James is the angel or the devil for what he hath brought to baseball, depending on your point of view. On the one hand, he opened the door to a new way of thinking about things, using number to prove or disprove conventional thinking about a player's reputation and the actual quality of his work, issues which are not always the same thing.

On the other hand, James opened the door to a new way of thinking about thing, which for traditionalists can confuse with facts. Of course, there are those who say, to, paraphrase the situation, that the devil can quote scripture to serve his purpose. Likewise there are lies, damn lies, and statistics.

James has gone on to fine tune his statistics and analysis to the point where he is much sought after, serving as a consultant for the Boston Red Sox. His new book, The Bill James Gold Mine is at once wonderful and frustrating. His observations are just as spot on as in the past, as he has learned to adjust to the times (is he following them or leading them, one wonders. After all, the Red Sox gig...). He intersperses his team capsules with essays on such diverse topics as "The Turk Farrell Award" (given to the pitcher "who best represents the idea that a really good pitcher doesn't have to have a really good record"); "Cigar Points," about players who come agonizingly closer to numbers that would push them into the elite category; and "Atypical Seasons" (just what it sounds like).

While Gold Mine does offer several nuggets, there's also a lot of dust (Hey, I didn't name the book, so don't blame me for the analogies. For example, he only provides record for a handful of players on each team. For example, to take one player totally at random, James writes about the Sox' Hideki Okajima, whose

favorite pitches were his fastball, his chanegup and his curveball, in that order. But when in a lefty-lefty matchup, he relied more on the curveball (25% of the time) than the changeup (19%). Against righties, the curveball was fairly rare (only 12% of his pitches).

The comments are accompanied by a Pitch Type Analysis chart shows that he threw a total of 1,062 pitches, out of which 516 (or 49%) were fastballs, 180 (17%) were curves, 349 (33%) were changeups. Plus five pitchouts and another twelve pitches that missed being charted (at least he's being honest).

James does similar things batters as well, breaking their accomplishments down by the types of pitches they swung at (or didn't) and where in the strike zone they were (or weren't), and similar data.

One complaint is that he doesn't do it for everyone. I can't say I blame him; a book like that could easily be more than 1,000 pages and cost substantially more than the $21.95 list price. Another quibble is that there is no glossary, so anyone coming late to the Bill James table might be a bit confused by some of the terminology. That cold have been easily addressed in an appendix without any undue hardship.

Still, Gold Mine marks a welcome return to the "abstract" world for James. here's hoping he isn't such a stranger to his fans in the future.

"Is this all there is ?"
Have all the interesting aspects of baseball been covered/discovered ? Here we get lots of "nuggets" usually paired with analysis consisting of "I have no idea what this means". There is even a full page color picture devoted to Brad Hawpe as clutch hitter of the year, a skill that James has (rightly) long contended doesn't really exist but is random chance. What the @$#* ?

Most of the tidbits sound like the meaningless stats based on tiny samples that are often quoted during telecasts featuring Tim McCarver.

While this may have been acceptable coming from the Hardball Times writers, for someone who has such brilliant previous writing to his credit, this can only be a major disappointment.

"The Bill James Gold Mine 2008"
If circumstances only allow you to purchase and/or read one baseball book this spring, you cannot make a better choice than "The Bill James Gold Mine 2008."

In this book, James provides fun and informative statistical analysis on every big league team - in addition to 17 new essays that are a treat to read.

Among my favorites were:

"Three to Five Run Records" - which shows you the best and worst teams when they scored or allowed three to five runs in a game.

"The Dave Kingman Award" - where James uses "HR/[RC+10]" to show us which batters over the last 30 years were the "best" at "hitting home runs without doing anything else positive as a hitter."

"The Turk Farrell Award" - which identifies good pitchers who had terrible records because their team stunk.

"The Nolan Ryan Award" - given to unreformed power pitchers via James' formula of "[W*L*SO*BB]/IP."

"End Game" - which identifies "the moment at which it ain't over, but it's over" for a team with respect to their place in the standings. (This essay suggests that the three greatest collapses in baseball history belong to the 1951 Dodgers, 1964 Phillies, 2007 Mets, and 1978 Red Sox - in that order.)

"Closer Fatigue" - where James shows how fatigue level of a closer impacts success for his team.

"Strength Up the Middle" - that confirms good teams are strong "up the middle" - and it's more true that bad teams are weak in this area.

"Bullpens and Crunches" - that establishes teams with good bullpens "tend to exceed expectations" in one-run and close games. But, it also shares that there's no definitive evidence that teams with strong bullpens do well in the post-season.

"Herbie" - where James introduces a stat that identifies "a more reasonable candidate for the league's best pitcher than the actual ERA leader."

Brass tacks, if you were a fan of The Bill James Baseball Abstracts, you will enjoy this book. And, if you've never read James' Abstracts, and always wondered what the fuss was about, you owe it to yourself to pick up this book.

"The Bill James Gold Mine 2008" is the type of baseball book that's so much fun, and enlightening, that you'll want to re-read it, again, the minute you finish reading it for the first time. And, there's a good chance that you'll want to read it a third time after that - as there's so much good stuff in it.