Moneyball - Michael Lewis [32]
It was while guarding Stokely Van Camp’s pork and beans that James stumbled seriously into putting his thoughts down on paper, in response to having things he absolutely needed to say that he was unable to convey any other way. “Every form of strength is also a form of weakness,” he once wrote. “Pretty girls tend to become insufferable because, being pretty, their faults are too much tolerated. Possessions entrap men, and wealth paralyzes them. I learned to write because I am one of those people who somehow cannot manage the common communications of smiles and gestures, but must use words to get across things that other people would never need to say.”
Even more oddly, everything James needed to say was either about baseball, or could be said only in the context of a discussion of baseball. “I’d probably be a writer if there was no such thing as baseball,” he said, “but because there is such a thing as baseball I can’t imagine writing about anything else.” He was, from time to time, aware of the absurdity of devoting an entire adult life to the search for meaning in box scores. He never seems to have resisted his instinct to do it. “Now, look,” he wrote to his readers, once he’d become an established, successful author, “both of my parents died of cancer, and I fully expect that it’s going to get me, too, in time. It would be very easy for me to say that cancer research is more important to me than baseball—but I must admit that I don’t do anything which would be consistent with such a belief. I think about cancer research a few times a month; I think about baseball virtually every waking hour of my life.”
James’s first book was self-published—photocopied and stapled together by himself—and ran just sixty-eight pages (production budget: $112.73). Its formal title was: 1977 Baseball Abstract: Featuring 18 Categories of Statistical Information That You Just Can’t Find Anywhere Else. To sell it, James took out a single one-inch advertisement in The Sporting News. Seventy-five people found it alluring enough to buy a copy. Opening its pale blue cover, they found a short opening explanatory paragraph that failed to explain anything much, followed by sixteen pages of baseball statistics. Astonishingly short and abrupt paragraphs followed by pages and pages of numbers: that was James’s quixotic early approach to getting across what he had to say. Were it not for the author’s frequent assertion that it was one, there was no reason to think of the first Baseball Abstract as a book. (“In this next section of this book…”) And there was certainly no reason to think that the writer had the capacity to lead the reader to a radical, entirely original understanding of his subject. What little James actually wrote in his first book felt stage-frightened. The questions he posed—Do some pitchers draw bigger crowds than others? How much effect does an umpire crew have on the length of a game?—could not possibly have interested anyone but the nuttiest baseball nut and, in any case, couldn’t be answered confidently with the data James had, from a single baseball season.
It wasn’t until the end of the 1977 Baseball Abstract that James offered his cocktail party–sized readership a glimpse of his potential. The topic that finally gets him sufficiently worked up that he devotes several entire pages to it of nothing but words is: fielding statistics. The manner in which baseball people evaluate players’ fielding performance—adding up their errors, and applauding the guy with the fewest—struck him as an outrage. “What is an error?” he asked. “It is, without exception, the only major statistic in sports which is a record of what an observer thinks should have been accomplished. It’s a moral judgment, really, in the peculiar quasi-morality of the locker room…. Basketball scorers count mechanical