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The delay, we were told, would be at least two hours, probably a lot longer. So it seemed as good a time as any to try to determine whether the 1999 Royals outfield — with a 22-year-old Carlos Beltran, a 25-year-old Johnny Damon and a 25-year-old Jermaine Dye — was in fact the best collection of young outfielders in baseball history.
This is the sort of quest that Bill James inspires — in this case, the task honestly was inspired by Bill James because he sent me an e-mail last week asking, “How many teams in baseball history had a young outfield that good?” But the truth is that Bill has inspired countless people all over America to ask these sorts of off-the-wall baseball questions (and football questions, basketball, economics, you name it) and try to find real answers.
In this way, I think Bill has changed the landscape of what it means to be a 21st-century sports fan. He was not the first guy to shake his head at conventional wisdom (like, who says that pitching is 75 percent of baseball), then dive into the data and try to find real sports answers. No. Bill was just the guy who made it seem like fun.
It has been fun for him. James was inducted into the Kansas Baseball Hall of Fame on Saturday — along with World Series hero Joe Carter, college baseball legend Phil Stephenson and former major-league pitcher Brian Holman — and at the ceremony he told the story of playing on his high school baseball team in Mayetta, Kan. One day his coach held a team meeting and explained what each player’s role would be … but he didn’t mention Bill’s name. When the meeting ended, Bill went to the coach and asked, “What’s my role?”
His coach said: “If you behave yourself, you can sit on the bench.”
Bill has never been much about behaving himself. He went to college, went to the army, went to work. And when he was supposed to be working as a security guard at the Stokely-Van Camp plant in Lawrence — I guess he was supposed to keep the pork from attacking the beans or vice versa — he was in fact tabulating box scores and breaking down the game and trying to figure out why in the heck Enos Cabell was playing every day.
He wrote about baseball, but in a different way. He was an outsider, and he embraced that role. He wrote sacrilegious things, wrote batting average was no way to measure a hitter, wrote that ballparks could make a break or a player’s numbers, wrote that counting errors was a pretty pointless way to measure a guy’s defense. At the time the stuff was so different from what was in the papers and on television that many people took to mocking Bill James. That was OK. He mocked back. He was better at it.
Over time, of course, people began to realize that most of what Bill was saying was true — or at least a lot more true than the conventional wisdom. Batting average is, in fact, a ridiculously flawed statistic because it doesn’t bother to count walks. Ballparks, as anyone who watched Neifi Perez hit .321 at Coors Field, do have huge effects on ballplayers’ numbers. And you cannot judge a fielder by his errors anymore than you can judge a pitcher by his wild pitches.
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