Bill James has left the building.
I remember picking up the first edition of his Baseball Abstract when it first became commercially available in the late 1980s. Since then, his work has become synonymous with clever analysis, as opposed to just a collection of numbers one could find in various encyclopedias. The Walk-Off Edition, the finale of his eponymous Handbook series, was released last October.
So the question is, what will fill the void?
One potential source comes from David J. Fleming, who released Baseball Obscura 2024 in February.
The subtitle is “Essays, Insights, and Analysis About Baseball That You Can’t Find Anywhere Else.” I don’t know if that’s strictly true as there are dozens of sites devoted to looking at the game from increasing angles (and you thought there were only 360 degrees in a circle).
After a few “General Essays: Where We Are,” Fleming, like James, devotes chapters to each team, replete with observations about individual players or situations. He follows this with additional essays on “Where We’ve Been/Where We’re Going.” Unlike James, there are a whole passel of new stats that enter into the mix. One of these, Run Element Ratio, is the topic of “A Not-Brief Enough History of Baseball Told Through a Statistic.”
A generation ago, it was James’ “Runs Created” that was supposed to be the definitive stat. Most recently “Wins Above Replacement” (WAR) has become the go-to. There have been many in between. Anthony Castrovince gave us the excellent Fan’s Guide to Baseball Analytics: Why WAR, WHIP, wOBA, and Other Advanced Sabermetrics Are Essential to Understanding Modern Baseball in 2020. None of these are perfect, at least to this math-challenged reader.
The problem with these items is that they basically do not deal with the future. Baseball magazines which were supposed to predict the coming season are all but gone
So does Baseball Obscura do the job? Depends on who you ask. The back cover begins with the line, “This is a book you do not need” and ends with “This is the first try at what’s destined to be either an annual classic or a yearly mistake.”
Remember, the Baseball Abstract took some time to get going and look where that got us.
is available on Amazon.com,
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