The Mind of Bill James

The Mind of Bill James: How a Complete Outsider Changed Baseball by Scott Gray
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve been a Red Sox fan since I was five or six years old. My heart is held together by superglue, bailing wire, and duct tape it’s been broken so many times. Sometime in the 1980s it got so bad I found I was no longer able to bear watching the games.* I could hardly stand to read the box scores the next morning.

When the players went on strike in 1994 Bill and I more or less abandoned baseball. Bill did watch the World Series and he did insist I see the end of That Game in 2004 when the Sox finally won the series. But I was pretty sure my romance with baseball, which started back when I was watching Ted Williams and Carl Yastrzemski play left field, was over.

Until this season when Bill bought season tickets to the Spokane Indians. They are a short season A- team, but they sparked the old flame and I’ve been following the Red Sox this year (as they proceeded to a 3 and 10 record early in the season, routinely leaving 11 or 15 men on and in one game leaving the bases loaded in three innings. Heartbreaking, just like old times.)

Since I’m one of those people who if they smell smoke immediately look for a book on firefighting (calling 911 can come later,) I needed to do some quality reading to catch up quickly on what has been going on for the last 17 years. And in that regard I was fortunate to have found a friend of a friend on Goodreads, Victor, who is a sports fan and avid reader of books on the subject. He gave me a short list of good baseball books and I got started.

The Mind of Bill James was the first one on the list, and it’s delightful reading as well as a way to bring me up to date on the new statistical revolution in baseball, a revolution that is more interested in the number of walks a player gets than in how many runs he bats in and that counts the plays made by outfielders instead of the number of errors. It’s complicated but it makes sense and it may have something to do with the Red Sox and that miraculous 2004 season.

I have another three or four baseball books in the pipeline and I’m watching games again. However much baseball has changed, and it has changed dramatically since the late 40s, it’s really still the same baseball it was when in my youth I used to lie in the hammock on summer afternoons and listen to Kurt Gowdy on the radio and score the games.

*One night shortly after I married Bill the Sox were ahead 6-2 in the 8th and I went to bed crying (and mystifying Bill.) I couldn’t bear to watch the rest of the game. I knew what was going to happen. And of course it did.

2011 No 67 Coming soon: Invisible Man

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Comments

[Wilhelm]

Well, let's straighten out the record as best I recall. It was four years after we were married. The Red Sox were ahead 3-2. Yes, it was game 6 of the 1986 World Series -- one of the most famous (or infamous) games in baseball history. The "Buckner" game.

[Mary Ronan Drew]

I was wise to retreat to my boudoir to weep, was I not?