The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract
The book that made statistics readable: a century of baseball, decade by decade, ranked and endlessly argued over.
James rebuilt his 1985 Abstract from the ground up, working decade by decade, ranking the hundred best players at every position and arguing with himself in the footnotes. The statistics are the frame; the writing is the reason to read it. He invented most of the methods that became sabermetrics and refused to let them harden into orthodoxy, which is why the essays outlast the numbers they rest on.
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