This Time Let's Not Eat the Bones: Bill James Without the Numbers

I am a Bill James fan, i admit - i enjoy most of his books and his writing style, and i find myself agreeing with most everything he has to say. Some of his lines have been classics, like the one about Greg Luzinski in his new Historical Abstract - thru this book, i can see how he was putting more anger and vitriol into his later abstracts and I understand why he stopped writing them. My big question is this, and i pose it to everyone - Bill James himself, his book publishers, Ballantine books, and just the whole book industry - if his yearly baseball abstracts were so good and so revolutionary then, including the early mimeographed versions, why hasn't anyone put them ALL into a complete book version? Why let them change hands, dog eared copies and all, thru various used book dealers and the sort, at outrageous prices, when I'm sure there are quite a few people who would love to buy them in a complete single book? I understand that this would be a big book at a pretty prohibitive price but i have always wanted to be able to read those earlier abstracts. This book is a good book but it feels like a magazine piece that was thrown together - the short tidbits are just that - short tidbits that generally want me leaving more. It felt like stop and go driving.

A truly wonderful book. James writes profound essays on all aspects of baseball. He cuts through the nonsense that ignorant journalists write and say about baseball. He proves he can write intelligently on baseball without throwing statistics at the reader. The book is basically four parts: reviews of the state of the baseball teams in the 1980s which is somewhat obsolete, critical comments on baseball players and managers, various essays on all aspects of baseball, and various studies discussing issues like the platooning advantage and the effect of stolen bases on team performance. Disdaining baseball "purists" , he offers controversial ideas, some of which he continues to put forth in his recent New Historical Baseball Abstract. Even though this was written almost 20 years ago, it is still relevant today. If you are a fan of good baseball writing, you should pick this up ASAP.

As a baseball fan, Bill James speaks his mind entertainingly, and as a student of statistics, he puts evidence where his mouth is, convincingly. This collection brings together excerpts from a number of his earlier books, with the focus on the entertaining and opinionated writing, rather than the statistical analysis. The intelligent baseball fan will find this, like his other books, to be unputdownable reading.