The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract

by Bill James

Book, 2010

Status

Available

Call number

796

Genres

Publication

Free Press

Description

When Bill James published his original Historical Baseball Abstract in 1985, he produced an immediate classic, hailed by the Chicago Tribune as the "holy book of baseball." Now, baseball's beloved "Sultan of Stats" (The Boston Globe) is back with a fully revised and updated edition for the new millennium. Like the original, The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract is really several books in one. The Game provides a century's worth of American baseball history, told one decade at a time, with energetic facts and figures about How, Where, and by Whom the game was played. In The Players, you'll find listings of the top 100 players at each position in the major leagues, along with James's signature stats-based ratings method called "Win Shares," a way of quantifying individual performance and calculating the offensive and defensive contributions of catchers, pitchers, infielders, and outfielders. And there's more: the Reference section covers Win Shares for each season and each player, and even offers a Win Share team comparison. A must-have for baseball fans and historians alike, The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract is as essential, entertaining, and enlightening as the sport itself.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member ksmyth

I don't know why I buy James's books. I guess I keep hoping I'll find something that isn't there. Maybe some soul.

James is the founding father of sabermetrics, which reduces the game of baseball to a numerical formula.

It's kind of fun to read his analyses of great players of the game. He does does

create a great historical context for baseball in the beginning of the book, and some of the comparisons he makes between players are interesting. However, some of the conclusions he draws I simply don't agree with. I love baseball as an aesthetic activity, and Bill loves something else. He's wrong.

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LibraryThing member Dystopos

A great reference for arguments about the best players "of all time" at any position. This is the book that sets out the argument for "win shares" as an individual statistic and summarizes the changes in the game from the late 19th century to the present. Surprisingly easy to read, and riddled with

tasty morsels, but in the end, not exactly as filling as its heft would make you expect.

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LibraryThing member Nestus_Gurley

A must-have from the incomparable Bill James. The tone can be annoying--James is too often jovial--but his arguments are first rate.

LibraryThing member datrappert

Basically, almost 1000 pages of the most self-indulgent writing you will ever see, including James' opinion on pretty much everything from A to Z, with a heavy emphasis on some pretty conservative social comments. I won't say that I didn't enjoy it--I pretty much couldn't put the book down, but

there are so many disappointments here. Mostly these come when you get to a player you are interested in and find that James has gone off on another one of his tangents or provided a cryptic one-sentence comment. The book is also incredibly dated, of course, but that's a bit less of a problem, since the players in the steriod-fueled decades that followed don't interest me that much. I haven't actually paid attention to baseball in the last 25 years at all. So, why am I reading this book at all? Nostalgia, perhaps. It was fun remembering some players I had completely forgotten about. James metrics are a bit out of date, however, compared to the latest ones in use.

Also, for what is the 5th printing, it is full of typos and printing errors.

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