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By Root 355 0

baseball game, put the players in the role of general manager of a team of real life baseball players, which he picked himself from actual teams. Each morning he’d get up and go to the box scores in the newspaper to calculate how his “team” had done. Over the next decade some immeasurable but vast number of Americans—millions, certainly—took to the game, many of them obsessively. That they should have developed a special interest in Bill James was strange, in a way. The fantasy games were premised on the old-fashioned statistics, the pre-Jamesean understanding of baseball. The general manager of a Rotisserie team measured his success by toting up batting averages, RBIs, stolen bases, and so on. To win one’s Rotisserie League you needed to behave pretty much like bone-headed general managers. You needed to overpay for RBIs and batting averages and stolen bases; you had no use for on-base and slugging percentages. You certainly didn’t need access to the growing corpus of new baseball knowledge. Rotisserie Baseball was, if anything, a force for encouraging the conventional view of baseball.

Nevertheless! The fans were more keenly interested in the information they needed to make intelligent baseball decisions—even if they themselves did not directly benefit from making intelligent baseball decisions—than the people who ran the real teams. They needed it, or thought they needed it, to win their fantasy games. As James later admitted, the desire to win these games had been a chief motive for his original rethinking of the game. Before the sophisticated baseball fantasy leagues there had been sophisticated table-top baseball games. “I used to be in a table-game league,” James confessed to his readers a decade later. “This was ten, twelve years ago…. It was during this period, in trying to win that league, that I became obsessed with how an offense works and why it doesn’t work sometimes…with finding what information you would need to have to simulate baseball in a more accurate way. I had thought about these things before, of course, but to win that damn [table league] I had to know.”

James knew better than just about anyone on the planet just how many people were taking to these fantasy games, and how widespread was the desire to play at being the general manager of a big league baseball team, and, therefore, how deep the interest in baseball statistics. He became an investor and creative director of the newly energized STATS Inc. The company grew rapidly—ESPN was a customer from the start and USA Today soon became one. It became the leading source of information to the baseball fan until it was sold in 1999 for $45 million to Fox News Corporation.

The company was a success, but of a curious kind: what should have happened didn’t happen. What should have happened is this: real, as opposed to fantasy, general managers would engage with this new, growing body of knowledge. The Jamesean movement set the table for the geeks to rush in and take over the general management of the game. Everywhere one turned in competitive markets, technology was offering the people who understood it an edge. What was happening to capitalism should have happened to baseball: the technical man with his analytical magic should have risen to prominence in baseball management, just as he was rising to prominence on, say, Wall Street.

What the baseball professionals did do, on occasion, beginning in the early 1980s, was to hire some guy who knew how to switch on the computer. But they did this less with honest curiosity than in the spirit of a beleaguered visitor to Morocco hiring a tour guide: pay off one so that the seventy-five others will stop trying to trade you their camels for your wife. Which one you pay off is largely irrelevant. Some stat head would impress himself upon a general manager as the sort of guy who crunched numbers and the GM would find him a small office in the back.

The lack of discrimination of the few baseball GMs who went shopping for a James manqué led to what might be called Elephant Man moments. The Elephant Man moment