Number-crunching: Bill James going soft?
Just kindle-bought Bob Neyer’s Big Book of Baseball Legends, and am amused by Bill James’s prologue:
The academics have won. The standards of accuracy that began in academia have been embraced by paid reporters and have now spread to the limitless legions of dignified researchers, pouding out accurate if boring biographies about absent and long-dead heroes.
And I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, you know? Dinosaurs are more interesting than unicorns. I don’t even read fiction; history is always more interesting. I am just saying… something humanizing and indefinable has been lost in the search for the truth — lost or, worse yet, thrown away. For thousands of years, men made slightly heroic fiction out of their own petty lives. You can’t get away with that anymore.”
It’s a strange introduction to a book that is largely about debunking baseball myths. Stranger still, coming from someone who almost single-handedly turned number-crunching into part of America’s pastime and may have done more for increasing overall numeracy in the country than any government initiative. Still, it’s nice to hear a high priest of truth-by-numbers acknowledge that there’s more to baseball, and other things, than the numbers might be able to tell.