Moneyball - Michael Lewis [45]
Henry was, unsurprisingly, a longtime Bill James reader. Even after he became the owner of a real big league baseball team, Henry continued to play in a sophisticated fantasy league in which he deployed Jamesean tools and, as he put it, “cleaned up. I won every year.” But the real baseball team he owned continued to be run as if Bill James had never existed, and it didn’t clean up anything but its shattered pride after ninety-eight losses.
The problem Henry faced was social and political. For a man who had never played professional baseball to impose upon even a pathetic major league franchise an entirely new way of doing things meant alienating the baseball insiders he employed: the manager, the scouts, the players. In the end, he would have been ostracized by his own organization. And what was the point of being in baseball if you weren’t in baseball?
Right from the start Bill James assumed he had been writing for, not a mass audience, but a tiny group of people intensely interested in baseball. He wound up with a mass audience and went largely unread by the people most intensely interested in baseball: the men who ran the teams. Right through the 1980s and 1990s, James experienced only two responses to his work from baseball professionals. The first was opportunism from player agents, who wanted him to help them to demonstrate, in salary arbitration meetings with the teams, that their clients were underpaid. The other was hostility from the subcontractors who kept the stats for Major League Baseball.
When the Jamesean movement first took shape, the attitude toward baseball statistics inside the company whose job it was to keep the official statistics for Major League Baseball was an odd mixture of possessiveness and indifference. In the late 1970s, the baseball writer Dan Okrent, with two colleagues from book publishing, went to pitch an idea to the CEO of the Elias Sports Bureau, Seymour Siwoff. The idea, recalled Okrent, “was to try to persuade him to collaborate with us on a painstakingly detailed, under-the-fingernails things you never knew book about baseball stats. The image is indelible: We are sitting there with this guy who looks like a superannuated ferret, his pale skinny arms protruding from the billowing short sleeves of his white-on-white shirt, and he brushes us off with a dismissive wave of his hand. ‘Boys,’ he said, ‘nobody gives a shit about this stuff.’”
In 1985 the Elias Bureau finally woke up and published a book, a virtual twin in outward appearance to the 1985 Baseball Abstract, called the 1985 Elias Baseball Analyst. (The superannuated ferret was a co-author.) Although the company finally divulged some of the statistics they had long withheld from James and other analysts, they failed to do anything much with them. The writers imitated James’s prose style but, lacking anything interesting to say, they wound up sounding empty and arch. James was happy to confirm the casual reader’s impression that the Elias Bureau had a whiff of Salieri about it. “When the Baseball Abstract hit the best-seller lists,” James wrote in his final Abstract,
the [Elias Bureau] launched their own competitor, the main purposes of which were to:
a) make money
b) steal all of my ideas
c) make as many disparaging comments as possible about me
So that was a lot of fun.
The effect on James of being ignored by the people who stood to benefit the most from his work was to distance himself even further from those people. In his earlier writings James often tried to explain what he was up to, in such a way that it might invite baseball professionals to pay attention. His instinct, at first, was to assume that the people