Bill James Bio?

Meant to say, that's a great story, mookie.

Had to laugh at this--his arbitrariness when it comes to reader e-mail is often staggering.

What broadcast teams do you like to listen to past or present while watching a baseball game? (If any)
Asked by: chauncynnts

Answered: 3/7/2021
I'm not in the opinion business, you know?

Sorry, this is becoming an obsession: James's arbitrary rudeness.

Reader e-mail yesterday:

A friend and I were discussing the relative values of SP across eras
Asked by: willibphx

Answered: 4/24/2021
Sign Posts? Signal Patrols? Starter's Pistols? Sunday Prayers? Sausage Patties? Snappy Patter? Singing Performance? Street Parking? Sorry...I don't speak acronyms.

James cut the e-mail off there; I'm quite sure "SP" was very clear in the context of the whole question. So the same guy wrote back today:

My apologies, I mistakenly assumed that SP was common vernacular for this audience. To try again, how would you compare the value of two starting pitchers in different eras...

And the question went on there. This time, James answered.

Honest to god--getting the guy to write twice because James wanted to make a point, even though anyone reading would have fully understood him the first time. I remember James, 35 years ago, writing something to the effect that the reason he started self-publishing was because he wanted to be able to mention Babe Ruth without stopping to explain who Babe Ruth was; now he makes an issue of making people explain that SP means starting pitcher.

are these questions are from people who pay him money for the privilege of asking? either way, adler otm

Definitely, and I did think about it--the questioners (as I am) are paying. It's a nominal amount, but still. Another one from a couple of days ago:

Re: Maris/Killebrew...Off the top of my head I can think of three reasons why MVP voters might have looked more favorably on Maris than Killebrew:
Asked by: howard38

Answered: 4/21/2021
Good for you. Let's find something more interesting to talk about.

Followed by:

As you wish. Sorry I cut across your lawn.
Asked by: howard38

Answered: 4/23/2021
There is a difference between cutting across one's lawn and repeatedly insisting that I answer a stupid question.

If he just simply ignored questions he doesn't like, I'd say fine. But he edits them, insults the reader, and publishes them.

(And, just to clarify, the "Ask Bill" section is a small part of what you're paying for, although I tend to read that far more regularly than the rest of the site, only some of which is written by James. I sometimes link here to Dave Fleming's stuff--I like him.)

Perfect example of James's blind double-standard in the "Hey Bill" section.

Yesterday, responding to a questioner: "Well, that's partly true and partly nonsense."

Today, responding to someone else who used the word "bizarre" in connection to something James wrote: "I'm sorry; did you want to remain on the site? This is a discussion among friends and gentlemen..."

"friends and gentlemen", pffffffft

World's Best Hitter List from the Bill James Handbook 2022, Page 8: 1. Mike Trout, 2. Juan Soto, 3. Bryce Harper, 4. George Springer, 5. Mookie Betts, 6. Ronald Acuna Jr., 7. Fernando Tatis Jr., 8. Freddie Freeman, 9. Paul Goldschmidt, 10. Trea Turner.

Springer 4th? I assume Vlad's omission is based on three years' worth of data.

Springer is a surprise. we sure he's not taking fielding into account?!

Going by the title, I'd say no...The thing is, if this is based on the last three seasons--which would accommodate Acuna, Soto, and Tatis's inclusion, and explain Vlad's absence--then Springer had a career year in 2019, a pretty good COVID year, and a good but shortened 2021. If you don't ding him for time missed this year, I'd agree with Top 10, but not fourth.

Freeman/Goldschmidt side-by-side, of course.

world's best hitler list

Really interesting piece, not behind the paywall.

https://www.billjamesonline.com/seasons_in_the_shadows/

this was good

he’s just doing a thought exercise and trying to shed light on less-recognized greatness — and this in no way invalidates that effort — but this

Three of those four categories, however, discriminate against catchers, since catchers do not normally get enough playing time to lead the league in Win Shares or WAR or to have a total which is among the Top 20 in the decade. To address that issue, I awarded one additional point to any catcher who had 29 or more Win Shares in a season.

seems amusingly arbitrary in a field that’s already not short of such. (tbf he also discusses how there is no meaningful difference between players separated by tenths of WAR.)

It felt like a breakthrough of sorts to see him even use WAR for all of this (two years ago, he would sometimes dismiss reader e-mails for simply using the WAR acronym)--he has generally stuck to Win Shares for past studies. I think he's on something like the 5th stage of grief when it comes to Win Shares.

Three of my e-mails concerning a billing question have gone unanswered. I'll vent here.

Reader e-mail the other day: "Where do you rank Scherzer-Degrom in the best 1-2 pitching duos conversation?" (He went on a bit from there.)

James: "I must not be following you. In what sense are DeGrom and Scherzer a 'duo'. In what sense are they better than Carlton and Gibson? In what sense are they better than Roberts and Spahn? In what sense are they better than Newhouser and Feller? I am just not following you."

Someone else followed up today: "An earlier writer asked about a Scherzer-deGrom pitching duo. I'm assuming you hadn't yet heard they were teammates. But to ask a specific question: entering 2022, Max Scherzer and Jacob deGrom will be teammates. They are currently 1-2 in the Starting Pitcher rankings with scores of 487.1 and 466.1, respectively..."

Those Starting Pitcher rankings are James's own creation.

James: (after a few preliminary paragraphs about great 1-2 duos) "In this case? It'll never work. What creates great team pitching is a combination of ballpark, fielding, usage patterns and great talent. Scherzer is almost 40; deGrom is well past 30 and has broken down more times than a 30-year-old Chevy. It won't work."

He may well be right. The bizarre thing, though, is treating the question like it's silly when Scherzer and deGrom are presently on top of his own leaderboard.

I'm glad you're around to document Bill James slowly losing his marbles. Why is he being so willfully obtuse?

I think he's trying to say that it's silly to compare them to other great duos when they haven't played together yet. He could explain himself like any reasonable person would, why does he treat his paying customers this way?

I'm going to send in an application to ghost answer his reader e-mail: "Theoretically great, yes--they presently sit 1-2 on our Starting Pitcher rankings--but let's see if they're healthy." Is that so hard?

(There's unmistakable sarcasm in the follow-up e-mail; I notice readers are starting to push back a bit.)

Interesting James response to Tom Tango today:

"There are critical problems with WAR that you have never acknowledged and the public is completely unaware of, but this is probably not the optimum place to try to discuss them. I'd like, if we can find the time, for the two of us to have an extended discussion of the issues, perhaps to be published as a short book."

"...and the public is completely unaware of" made me laugh--it's like the Kennedy assassination, the truth is being held back--but I would read that book.

"No, I definitely do not think that Trout takes too many walks. Mickey Mantle walked a lot more than Trout does, and as I recall the Yankees did win a championship or two despite this handicap"--that's how you handle an awkward question. (I'm going to refrain from calling it a dumb question, because the guy very carefully explained what he meant.)

"Asking MLB and the players to sit down together and work out a solution to baseball's problems is kind of like asking John Dillinger and Machine Gun Kelly to sit down face to face and work out a solution to the bank robbery problem."

Try again Bill

I thought that was a pretty good analogy.

James took one of my "Hey Bills" and turned it into a piece he posted today (mentioning me by name). That's it; life can't show me anything more.

https://www.billjamesonline.com/vagabonds_and_homebodies/

whoa!

following on clemenza/bill james' "one team" hall of fame methodology, there was a fun post on a cardinals blog applying the same thing to cardinals players to see how much they were associated with the Cardinals vs other teams:

https://www.vivaelbirdos.com/2022/1/21/22883532/how-much-of-a-cardinal-were-the-best-cardinals

Bill James recently took a look at the importance of being associated with one team for Hall of Fame candidates. The idea is that players who accrue most of their value for one team, or mostly for one team, have an easier time making the Hall of Fame than players who accrue their value for multiple teams. If you’d like an imperfect example, Gary Sheffield had 62.1 career fWAR, but he had 12 or more for three different teams, and 6 or more for five different teams. By contrast, Willie Stargell had 62.9 fWAR, all with the Pittsburgh Pirates. James’ research compared those two types of players and all others in the gray area. James found that players with mutliple team associations had a much harder time getting into the Hall of Fame. That’s fascinating... and it’s also not what I want to talk about today. In his process, he developed a fun little tool to determine what percentage a player was associated with a specific team. I thought it would be fun to apply that process to various St. Louis Cardinals and determine how “Cardinal-y” they were.

First, here is James’ methodology:

Suppose that a player has 10 Win Shares (or 10 WAR, or 10 games played, or 10 RBI, or 10 homers; it doesn’t much matter.) Suppose he has 10, and all 10 are with one team. Then his “one team percentage” is 100%.

(10 ^ 2) / (10 ^ 2) = 100 / 100 = 1.000

Suppose that he plays for two teams and has five Win Shares for each team; then his “one team percentage” is 50%:

[(5 ^ 2) + (5 ^ 2)] / (10 ^ 2) = (25 + 25) / 100 = 50/100 = .500

Suppose that he plays for three teams, and has four Win Shares for each team; then is “one team percentage” is 33.33%:

[(4 ^ 2) + (4 ^ 2) + (4 ^ 2)] / (12 ^ 2) = (16 + 16 + 16) / 144 = 48/144 = .33333333

then they apply this to various cardinal players. some interesting ones:

Albert Pujols, 99.57% (almost completely associated with the cardinals despite a decade with the angels)
Ozzie Smith, 98.17%
Willie McGee, 92.53%
Jim Edmonds, 82.12%
Matt Holliday, 63.10%
Keith Hernandez, 62.59%
Terry Pendleton, 54.37%
J.D. Drew, 51.99%
Scott Rolen, 43.40%
Joe Torre, 34.55%
Curt Simmons, 26.23%
Mark McGwire, 19.71%
Steve Carlton, 7.26%
Johnny Mize, 65.79%

etc. fun exercise, and it would be fun to see for other players and teams, too

uh, also the author of the post and various commenters are not sure if they used the formula right. lol. sorry. it's a vox run blog, they get paid like $2/article and online mattress promo codes, the standards are low

"Yeah, I borked it. Full disclosure."

welp. if a mod wants to remove the last 3 posts (including this one) that's fine with me.

First thing I noticed was McGwire at 20%; at the very least 50/50 with Oakland, but I suspect he's much more identified with the Cardinals at this point.

bash bros 4ever

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FL6Z7x1WUAIisif.jpg

welp

Obviously Bill "learned" a few things working in management with Boston for 10-plus years.

Answering a "Hey Bill" about Dale Murphy:

"But the problem is that they are very weak MVP seasons. It was just a league in which no one had a season which meets the normal standard of an MVP season. Somebody had to win it, and they picked Murphy, which is fine, but if Mickey Mantle had ever had a season like that, the Yankees would have panicked, or the same with Steve Trout."

Not sure if that's a joke or an old-guy mistake.

Maybe he meant Mike Carp.

In case you were wondering.

I don't know if I have written this, but I categorize Hall of Fame candidates in one of 5 groups.

Group 1 is the inner-circle, automatic-unless-there's-a-scandal Hall of Famer--Willie Mays, Mike Schmidt, Roger Clemens or Mike Trout.

Group 2 is a player who is above the normal standard of a Hall of Fame player--Al Kaline, Roberto Clemente, Harry Heilmann, Charlie Gehringer, Johnny Bench.

Group 3 is a this-type-of-guy-is-normally elected to the Hall of Fame--Duke Snider, Early Wynn, Willie McCovey, Billy Williams, Ferguson Jenkins.

Group 4 is the players-of-this-caliber are not usually Hall of Famers, but sometimes they get lucky group...Catfish Hunter, Luis Tiant, Gil Hodges, Tony Perez, Orlando Cepeda, Jack Clark, Willie Randolph, Harold Baines.

Group 5 is players who clearly should NOT be in the Hall of Fame, even though some have been selected...Travis Jackson, Chick Hafey, Rick Ferrell, Addie Joss, Lee Smith, Matt Kemp, Ernie Lombardi, Vic Wertz, Bill Mazeroski, Doc Cramer, Mark Buehrle, etc.

"The Searchers is not one of the 25 best John Wayne movies, probably not one of the 50 best."

I really wish he'd add an "If you ask me" or an "I know I'm alone on this" to that, something to make it sound less like an assertion of fact. Just not his nature.

lol

you should absolutely demand that he list the first 25 tho

He's also oblivious to the film's history. "It's an almost unwatchable movie much admired by pretentious twits who base their opinions on what the critics tell them." The Searchers would have been totally ignored by whatever pretentious twits walked the earth in 1956--that's not the path it took to its present-day stature.

Not behind the paywall, I don't think.

https://www.billjamesonline.com/the_great_player_of_year_x/

How to save yourself the cost of hiring someone to poll your demographics:

The first player you clearly remember seeing (live or on TV) was a contemporary of:

(If you're too young to remember any, please choose 4th group. Thank you.)

— Bill James Online (@billjamesonline) January 17, 2023

No votes for Old Hoss Radbourn.

Twitter poll I find funny:

Who do you want to bring back to television?

— Bill James Online (@billjamesonline) April 25, 2023

Tweet the other day: "If the Yankee fans somehow get Munson into the Hall of Fame, then we DEFINITELY should get Varitek in." (Followed later by "I'm signing off Twitter for the day. Those of you who wish to contribute to the barrage of personal insults following the Thurman Munson jokes will have to wait until tomorrow until I can block you.")

He has this weird hate-on for Munson. I looked at the two of them, Munson and Varitek--if he wasn't joking, and I'm pretty sure he wasn't, I don't see the comparison. They had almost the same number of career PA, and it's hard to find anywhere where Munson wasn't clearly superior, even with the shortened career. Admittedly, he was starting to decline the year of the plane crash, so his career rate stats almost certainly would have been less impressive had he played to 39 like Varitek, but what happened happened.

Wonder how he feels about Posey

I know he was running a Twitter poll the other day on Posey vs. Mauer, and he made some comment about them both being great players. There was a lot of commentary about the numerous Posey/Munson similarities when Posey retired, so, to my mind, there's some inconsistency there (i.e., of course agree with him about Posey, but don't see why he doesn't grant the same to Munson).

Thought this bump was going to be about this.

The only thing I will concede about Thurman Munson is that he was probably a better baseball player than he was a pilot.

Note that I said "probably".

— Bill James Online (@billjamesonline) May 23, 2023

Terrible, I agree. I defend him about lots, and he'll always be one of the key influences on me, but that's indefensible--I think he was really taken to task for it, and, as per his follow-up, got really defensive and snippy--and his inability to see how good a player Munson was is perplexing.

Damn:

https://www.billjamesonline.com/a_sunset_over_the_hill/

I complain lots about the way he conducts himself with readers--he recently shot down a Manoah-related question I sent in (not too pointedly, actually)--but knowing I could send in a question any time and count on most of them being answered, that was great. And I liked his right-hand guy, Dave Fleming, a lot.

If a couple of good books come out of this, that'll at least be something.