Proving that “Pee Wee” Gaskins is not “The Meanest Man in America”...Bill James with his latest!
Hey Bill, I am a relativley new subscriber, so I apologize if this question has been asked before. Is there any chance at all for a revision of the Historical Abstract? What about even a revised all time ranking by position?
Thanks; I appreciate your interest. People underestimate what would have to be done to revise the book. The standards of evidence change all the time, and they have changed dramatically in the last ten years. We simply KNOW many things now that we did not know ten years ago. ...not small things, but thousands and thousands and thousands of fairly major things that we know now, because of the Internet and Retrosheet and the computerization of records and of newspapers, that we did not know ten years ago. I undertand better how to rate and compare players than I did ten years ago.
I hope that people will be understanding of the mistakes I made ten years ago and 30 years ago, when information was much harder to come by than it is now and much more difficult to cross-check than it is now. But I can’t publish things NOW using the standards of accuracy that prevailed ten years ago.
To really do the book justice, I would have to start over and do it again. It would take me thousands of hours of work. I’d like to do it and I hope to do it again before I die, but I don’t see it happening in the next three or four years.
Bill, Thanks to Joe Posnanski I now understand that you probably had nothing to do in the signing of Carl Crawford…and I`m glad he put the records straight. I`m sure a lot of us didn`t understand that particular move (and some other ones) but had too much respect for you and your position with the Red Sox to ask questions about it. Hopefully your input will be put to better use in the rebuilding of my favorite team.
Well, I don’t know what Joe wrote about the signing, and I’m not trying to duck responsibility for any bad decisions the team has made. Joe and I are close friends, had lunch today, and I’m sure whatever he wrote is probably right, but I won’t read it. But back to Carl Crawford. ... When we win, we all get rings, you know? When we screw up, we’re all guilty.
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1. something like a train wreck Posted: September 16, 2012 at 09:15 AM (#4237118)Pass.
or maybe i am getting loopy
I would love a new book, but really if it's just a rehashing of the old book, with updated numbers, it's not really worth it.
The content of the mailbag changes gradually; new letters are added to the top and they push older letters down and off the first page. So every time you click on it, if you scroll down far enough, you'll see stuff you saw the last time.
Not really. He stated that we now have more information available about games played way back when and we now also have more data about how games are played now. He isn't stating that thanks to DIPS or WAR or Fangraphs or MGL or Tango that we now know more about baseball and baseball stats.
Yep, you could even read his statement as saying it would take so long because he'd have to start over from scratch (and reinvent the wheel) rather than using the work of others to inform his ratings. OK, that sounds snottier than I mean. What I mean is that one could save a lot of time by taking WAR (or similar) and then tweaking those lists where you think they've got it wrong (and explaining why).
"One" probably could, but I don't think Bill James could and still have a Bill James book. One of the reasons he's still interesting and significant is that he's as interested in the theoretical frameworks that lead to answers as he is in the answers themselves. I mean, you're not going to slice and dice the numbers in any way that doesn't have Ruth, Bonds, and Williams as the greatest hitters of all time. "Who's better" is a boring game for anyone with an Internet connection. "What can we now quantify about winning baseball games that we couldn't ten years ago" is a fascinating question.
If it was as detailed as the last one, I'd expect that finding all new things to talk about with the 100 players at each position would be quite difficult.
Partly because I have a bad memory, and partly because I have a lot of time on my hands, I've been working on a HBA style ranking of the players from my fan-life (1990 to present). Except not just top 100 at each position, but anyone with over 1000 PAs, 750 IP or 450 pitching appearances. The ranking is fun, though as #15 points out its nothing more than me taking WAR and arbitrarily weighting career and various peaks. The real value for me is in the little paragraphs I write about each guy. I mean, it would be a crime against humanity if twenty years from now I were to forget that Rob Mackowiak once hit a walk-off grand-slam, a ninth-inning game-tying home run, and had his son born all n the same day.
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