from Amazon
Wednesday, July 26, 2006
Baseball Abstract, 1983
When I was a kid in the summer of 1984, a friend lent me the Bill James’ Baseball Abstract, and I was hooked. I’d go to the bookstore downtown every weekend in the spring, waiting for the latest edition. 1985. 1986. 1987. 1988. Last year, I stumbled upong the 1982 edition in the library. And yesterday, I got the 1983 edition via Amazon. (Shouldn’t Bill James be turning all his old Abstracts into print-on-demand? If ever there was a case for POD for old books, there it is.)
The good old days were then. For those who don’t have a copy, I suggest reading the summary, and Lederer’s commentary here:
http://baseballanalysts.com/archives/2004/08/abstracts_from_17.php
As I read through my copy, I’ll just make a few observations.
1. James talks about Whitey Herzog, and how he adapts to the situation, rather than force the situation. One very interesting one is how he would go about and put Andujar on a 3-day rest rotation, while putting Forsch in a 4-day rest rotation, because Whitey believed that these pitchers perform better when used this way. Kind of hard to set up a rotation like this, but in the small sample that James presents, he did it. (Cue Retrosheet.)
Here is how often Andujar pitched on 3,4,5+ days rest: 12, 19, 5.
Bob Forsch did it this often: 0, 27, 6
The other big starter on the team was Steve Mura: 2, 17, 10
(All include relief appearances.)
So, Whitey did manage to rotate his pitchers the way he thought they should be rotated. The end-result is that Andujar had his best season. We of course don’t know that that’s the reason. Whitey only stuck with the 3-day rest for Andujar through June and July. In April/May, Andujar’s K/BB ratio was 40/11, in June/July, it was 41/18, and in Aug/Sept, 56/14.
2. James presents the Power/Speed Number, as 2*HR*SB/(HR+SB). In a later edition, he tried to put in a third term (from what I remember, it was Juan Samuel, and his triples, or something like that). It was an ugly equation. However, the above can be rewritten as:
2/(1/HR + 1/SB)
You can see therefore how you can actually expand this quite easily into three, four, as many terms as you want. Just change the “2” to the number of variables you have, and you are on your way.
3. In the Law of Competitive Balance, James mixes two things up: how players, teams respond to the situation they are in, and regression toward the mean. He talks about the two, indirectly, in various examples. Read 23 years later, it’s clear that James, at the time, didn’t really appreciate that the performance results of the player and teams are in fact just observed samples, and that these samples contain random variation. As a result, he mixes up great examples, with very poor ones. Still, that he actually asked the question, and showed (at the time surprising) results was quite impressive.