nc10's Full Review: Bill James - The Bill James Gold Mine 2008
The Bill James Gold Mine 2008 is a 316 page (8.5 X 11” pages, no less) book of articles and statistics developed by baseball’s preeminent sabremetrician, articles and stats that will help any baseball fan get ready for the 2008 major league baseball season. In many ways, Gold Mine 2008 is a return to the Baseball Abstracts and other books that James published in the '80's and '90's. Like those books, this book has articles, short tidbits, and/or statistics about every team. The articles here are just as interesting and fun to read as the ones included in his Baseball Abstracts 20 years ago. And James’ statistics, as always, provide a new way to look at players and the numbers, and teach fans things they never realized before.
Those 1980's Baseball Abstracts included a detailed treatment of each team, evaluating the stats to learn why each was successful or failed, and what to expect in the upcoming year. In the late '80's and early '90's his books evaluated every player with stats and a writeup. Those books certainly changed they way fans (and eventually many professionals) looked at the game, convincing them to take a very fundamental look at how effective players really were and how well the could realisitically be rexpected to perform. James has always been fun to read. And while Bill James wasn’t always right, his points and conclusions almost always had merit, and he’s corrected some of his few earlier mis-evaluations over the years. Unfortunally, James stopped publishing those annual books in the mid '90's.
This book isn’t as “complete” as the Baseball Abstracts (or later player evaluation books) were. Over time, James has become increasingly popular. He doesn’t have to cover every team in equal detail, and and his fans accept that he writes only about what he wants to write. Also, there are a lot more sabermetrics published now, I get the impression James only writes if he has something new to say.
Still, I expect fans of every team will enjoy this book. There are a few pages of interesting statistics for every major league team. Some are surprisingly interesting. For example, every regular player in 2008 saw approximately 50% balls and 50% strikes, except one. Most fans might be able to guess the one exception, Vlad Guerrero. But the percentage of strikes he saw was surprisingly less, by far, than anyone else, at 32%. In the Atlanta Braves stats, you learn that shortstop Edgar Renteria was the best shortstop in baseball in terms of getting to balls hit up the middle of the infield, but nearly the worst at getting to balls hit in the hole on the 3rd base side of short. In their respective team stat pages, you learn that Carlos Zambrano (Cubs) and Aaron Harang (Reds) and Bartolo Colon (Angels) pitch their best against the best teams they face, with ERA’s better than what they earn against sub 500 teams. The stats are interspersed with tidbits like this: Mariano Rivera threw a higher percentage of fastballs and cut fastballs than anyone else, 99%. The next highest percentage was 86%.
There’s also at least one article that covers some aspect of about 75% of the teams. To be fair, I should mention that the articles often only peripherally relate to the team, as a means for James to make some point you’ve likely not heard before. For example, the article following the St. Louis Cardinals stats describe a method to evaluate bullpens, eventually concluding that the 2004 Cardinals (the Pujols/Edmonds/Rolen juggernaut for the first 5 months in 2004, and barely recognizable in their 0-4 loss to Boston in the series) had the best bullpen of all time. The worst bullpen was the 2006 Cleveland Indians. Another article evaluates the consistency of over 1000 retired players, and concludes that Hank Aaron, Ron Cey, Wade Boggs, and Steve Garvey were among the top ten most consistent players of all time.
Bill James has provided predictions of which players would make the Hall of Fame several times before, though his success hasn’t been as good as he’d like. His previous estimates were based on comparing performance of current players with other hall of famers. In this book he explains that method required tweaking due to the expansion of baseball over the past 40 years. While the hall of fame only selects about 2-3 players each year, there are now about twice as many teams as there were in 1960. That means twice as many players which have stats that would have earned hall of fame status in 1970. But the number of players being inducted hasn’t doubled, which has led to the standards for hall of fame entry being raised. So, while 349 game winner Greg Maddux is still an obvious lock for the hall of fame, 239 game winner David Wells, 230 game winner Jamie Moyer and 210 game winner Kenny Rogers are real long shots, even though their stats are better than other pitchers in the hall of fame.
You can read almost everything in this book without buying it. Bill James now has a web site, appropriately called billjamesonline.com. Every article in this book is available at the website. Many of the stats are there also (maybe all, I’ve not checked). The articles chosen are sort of a “best of” collection at one point in time. Access to the website runs $3 a month. I’m not yet sure it will be worth $3 a month on an ongoing basis, but readers will easily get their first month's money’s worth reading all the stats and articles posted over the past few months. I’ve subscribed to the website, partly based on how much I like this book. Yet, I don’t regret buying the book ($15 from Amazon), I still enjoy setting down and reading a book much more than reading web pages. And I can share the book with other fans I know. You might prefer the online version, but either way, if you are a Bill James fan, or just a baseball fan in general, the content is terrific fun to read, and will change the way you think about players and your team.
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