Book Review
2006 Bill James Baseball Annual
By Mike SanClemente - Managing Editor
01/06/2006
Calling Bill James "innovative" is like saying University of Texas quarterback Vince Young is "mobile." Going further, the New Yorker says "James has become part of baseball legend," and that might not be hyperbole.
Think about how many people follow baseball closely enough to have a strong opinion about trades, player values, and in-game moves.
Now think of how many people - a huge subset of that population, especially in our Strat world - have changed their points of view over the years and subscribe to most of James' theories today. It's a big number, and it grows each year with his success as an advisor with the Red Sox, and with each new breakthrough analysis in his book, the annual Bill James Handbook 2006.
TEAM EFFICIENCY
Last year, in this book, James became the first in the industry to look at scoring efficiency. What is scoring efficiency? It has several components, but take a minute and you can understand them pretty easily.
For a given team, it compares expected runs created on offense against actual runs scored, then does the same for pitching with an approximation of expected runs allowed versus actual runs allowed by the staff.
Next it takes a team's Pythagorean (projected) wins compared to its actual wins, and wraps it all up with an overall efficiency rating. Given how many runs a club should have scored, how many it should have allowed, and how many games it should have won, how did it do (how efficient was it) in real life?
Among other conclusions, it showed that the Red Sox should have beaten the Yankees in the regular season standings in 2004. For the 2005 season, it validates the Indians' late run at the White Sox: the Indians' expected wins were 103, highest in the bigs.
The White Sox, however, won 9 more games than projected, most in the bigs. So Cleveland should have won the division by a whopping 13 games, a wide swing that we don't normally see. This should give Tribe fans hope for 2006.
BASERUNNING
In this year's book, he's added player-by-player baserunning analysis to his studies.
You know two players are slow, but one gets a running 1-9, the other running 1-11. Why? Perhaps the former actually thinks he's fast, makes bad baserunning decisions, and gets thrown out 4 times a year trying to take an extra base (first to third on a single) while the other guy accepts his fate, is conservative, and gets thrown out very rarely.
I actually have no idea if Strat has access to such information currently, but in the future, perhaps they should look at James' conclusions before publishing running ratings.
Whose running rating should be higher, a player with moderate speed who makes great decisions on the bases and rarely gets thrown out, or a much faster player whose daredevil antics get him thrown out frequently?
I'm not confident Strat sees specific stats that would enable them to change running ratings year to year; my hunch is that they go with reputation, input from scouts, and general age-related trends almost exclusively. I'd love it if a Stratogist reader did a quick study of 20 or so players, across different stages of their careers, to see how their running ratings changed over a four year span. Email me at mike@stratogists.com if you have done something like this, or would like to try your hand at it.
INJURIES
Back to the James book. Also in this year's edition is his injury projection system, showing which players are likely to get finger injuries (usually catchers), shoulder injuries, or my favorite, "any injury" (this latter group, unsurprisingly, includes Griffey, Cliff Floyd, Sandy "co-pay" Alomar Jr., Kerry Wood, and Wade Miller).
Honestly, in Strat, what's worse than a significant injury to your starter at a given position, if you play in a league with 20+ teams? Unless you're in what my friend from Boston calls "All-Stah" leagues, with multiple major league teams feeding into every 1 Strat team, an injury just kills you because you don't (typically) have a minor league player you can simply promote for part of next year, to cover for the injured starter.
Big league teams can do this, but normally we can't. Therefore, this injury section bears special watching for us.
Another section I like is the extended leader boards. These sections are great. Where else can you find the total number of pitches over 100 mph thrown by big league pitchers, or who throws the highest percentage of sliders? More standard leader lists like batting average vs. LHP, or percent of inherited runners stranded, are helpful too.
CAREER ASSESSMENT
In addition to the standard left-right splits, complete fielding recap, and projections for both hitters and pitchers, the last segment I'll recap is the career register.
As I pointed out in my 2005 Bill James book review, I'd love to see them provide minor league stats for more players. Right now, if any player plays even one big league game in three separate seasons, then bingo, you won't see any historical minor league stats from him, even if he really hasn't played enough big league ball to totally understand him. This is done for space reasons, and leaves us to look to other publications to help scope out a player's background.
Another change I'd like to see in this section is the additions of OPS for hitters and WHIP for pitchers. Aren't these stats far more useful to us than Sac Bunts allowed for pitchers, or even Runs and Earned Runs for pitchers - this information is already part of ERA, right?
Have you ever compared two pitchers' Runs allowed to figure out who's better? Of course not. But we - Bill James' own disciples! - frequently use WHIP and OPS to compare players, so I'm surprised they're not in there already.
I'm not sure anyone with decision-making ability reads this book review, though I wish they would. Stratomatic players are the perfect, most logical customers for the Bill James book. I work with consumer sales data on a daily basis for my real job, and we frequently talk about "heavy users" of a product, people who interact heavily with a given item. Strat players are heavy users of Bill James-type books, and our thoughts on how the book is structured should make for excellent feedback to the author.
James, and ACTA Publishing, I'm sure would love to get this book into the hands of the average fan, the armchair quarterback who follows his/her team from year to year but doesn't have a strong interest in the quantitative side of the game. But my guess is the most loyal buyers year after year are you and me. Having said that, if you haven't picked up a copy of his book recently, it might be a good idea to give it a whirl.
http://www.actapublications.com/, then click on Sports.