• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 455 0

French (now GlaxoSmithKline), and so had access to a computer. By day he used the SmithKline computers to discover new drugs and by night he used them to test his own theories about baseball. For instance, Cramer had a hypothesis about clutch hitting: it didn’t exist. No matter what the announcers said, and what the coaches believed, major league baseball players did not perform particularly well—or particularly badly—in critical situations. On the one hand, it made a funny kind of sense: no one who behaved differently under pressure would ever make it to the big leagues. On the other hand, it contradicted the sacred, received wisdom in baseball. The sheer counterintuitiveness of his notion delighted Cramer. “It violates everyone’s personal experience of pressure, and how they cope with it,” he said. And yet it was true, or impossible to disprove. Cramer had tested it and found no evidence that players hit differently in one situation than any other—with a pair of exceptions. Some left-handed hitters fared worse against lefties than righties, and some right-handed hitters fared worse against righties than lefties.

Cramer’s work has subsequently withstood intense, repeated critical scrutiny, but until Bill James came along no one paid it any attention. “Until Bill came along,” Cramer says, “it was just three or four of us writing letters to each other. Even my own family would say, ‘This is a crazy way to spend your time.’”

Cramer, like James, understood that the search for baseball knowledge was constrained by the raw statistics, and began to think seriously about starting a company to collect better data about Major League Baseball games than did Major League Baseball. One of the men to whom Cramer wrote letters on the subject was Pete Palmer. Palmer worked as an engineer at Raytheon, on the software that supported the radar station in the Aleutian Islands that monitored Russian test missiles. At least that’s what he did for money; for love he sat down with his charts and slide rule and analyzed baseball strategies. Both Palmer and Cramer had separately created their own models of the baseball offense that differed trivially from James’s. (Together, they later dreamed up the stat now widely used to capture the primary importance to offense of slugging and on-base percentages: OPS, an acronym for on base plus slugging.) Palmer really was a gifted statistical mind, and he had done a lot of work, just for the hell of it, that demonstrated the foolishness of many conventional baseball strategies. Bunts, stolen bases, hit and runs—they all were mostly self-defeating and all had a common theme: fear of public humiliation.

“Managers tend to pick a strategy that is least likely to fail rather than pick a strategy that is most efficient,” said Palmer. “The pain of looking bad is worse than the gain of making the best move.” Palmer had written a book back in the 1960s revealing all this. The manuscript was still gathering dust on his desk when Bill James came along and created a market for it. In 1984, in the wake of Bill James’s success, he was able to publish it: The Hidden Game of Baseball. “Bill proved there were buyers for this kind of thing,” Palmer says. “I’m not sure the book would have seen the light of day otherwise.”

James’s literary powers combined with his willingness to answer his mail to create a movement. Research scientists at big companies, university professors of physics and economics and life sciences, professional statisticians, Wall Street analysts, bored lawyers, math wizards unable to hold down regular jobs—all these people were soon mailing James their ideas, criticisms, models, and questions. His readership must have been one of the strangest group of people ever assembled under one idea. Before he found a publisher, James had four readers he considered “celebrities.” They were:

Norman Mailer

Baseball writer Dan Okrent

William Goldman, the screenwriter (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid)

The guy who played “Squiggy” on the TV sitcom Laverne & Shirley

James’s readers were hard to classify because