Kuzul

See Part 1, “More Story, Less Sabermetrics” / Part 2, “Understanding Baseball Through Its Mysterious, Magical Words”

Statistics are something of a fetish. 

Like a shrunken head, a stat is an encapsulation of a power once alive. It serves to recall and revivify the past, and sometimes to transform the future. 

When David Neft’s team that developed the landmark Macmillan Baseball Encyclopedia unearthed 19th-century RBI and dead-ball ERAs, Roger Connor, Sam Thompson and Addie Joss won Hall of Fame plaques after years out in the cold because the areas of their great accomplishment had not yet been recorded.

Once saves began to be counted after 1960, relief pitchers gained prestige, were compensated differently and eventually began to be used differently (with indifferent results, I might add) so as to produce more save opportunities for a designated closer. 

What are the outcomes of sabermetrics on the field to date? As general managers and managers came to understand that outs and runs were the currency of the game, as they had been from the very start, they began to value on-base percentage. Pitch count was not merely a way to preserve your own pitchers’ arms—it was also a weapon: By working the count a manager might force the hand of his opposing number and sooner get to the middle relievers, exposing the soft underbelly of nearly every staff.

Today it is probable that we overvalue walks where formerly they had been undervalued, and we scorn risky baserunning when once it was the prime delight of players and fans. The charm of the grand old game is that it appears to be the same as it ever was, or at least the same as in President McKinley’s day, but of course it has changed radically.

In terms of strategy it is hardly about baserunning and fielding at all, though recent sabermetric work in these areas may alter the balance yet again.

This all holds interest for me still. I remain interested in statistics not as indices of merit but as artifacts of play to which story adheres. As the tangible—and, as opposed to narrative history, unmediated—remains of games contested long ago, records transform play into a common experience repeatable at fixed intervals…which is not a bad way to define a rite or ritual. “People preserve their thousand-year-old experiences in the world of play,” wrote philosopher Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. 

Baseball is a backward-looking game, in which every action on the field resonates against plays imprinted—in the mind’s eye, in the collective memory and in the record books—long ago. 

The game came to the fore because it was adapted to the conditions of early national life; it changed as those conditions were altered. The taste of other days sustained a game marked by running and fielding; the taste of our day is for the contest of pitcher and hitter. It has been a long while since a home run usually involved running.

Baseball fans of earlier generations had fewer statistics at their disposal, but a simpler game perhaps had less need of them. Ultimately, the statistical fragments that were once saved in scrapbooks, or the new measures devised by ingenious fans, become relics that remind us at every moment that our youth was a wonderful if remote time. 

So, for me, “Farewell to Stats.” But maybe not to sabermetrics, whose definition has been disputed ever since Bill James coined the term. I believe in what Bill described in 1981 as a hallmark of the approach—to present new evidence from original source material rather than simply shuffling the existing data to make one’s point. This seems to me to go beyond statistics to describe reasonably well the kind of work I do—though admittedly absent the metrics.

Apart from family, what now seems important to me is play, a more serious activity than work and one that reveals more about who we are or wish to be. And the work that seems most like play to me is rummaging around in history’s attic, often emerging into the light empty-handed only to discover what was in plain sight all along.

John Thorn’s new book, Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game, debunks the myth of Abner Doubleday inventing baseball in Cooperstown and traces the game’s real roots in the 18th century. You can buy it at Amazon. 

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

Recently Major League Baseball named me its official historian, a great honor and an even greater opportunity. I hope to convince you that some knowledge of baseball’s past enhances the pleasure in every present moment. I won’t do it with one article, or even several, but perhaps in an extended dialogue into which you are cordially invited. So let’s get started.

Many fans believe the game’s useful history begins with when they first started playing it or watching it. In my household, as my three sons grew up in the game, there was always talk at the dinner table about Ken Griffey Jr. and Greg Maddux and Mike Schmidt—and Babe Ruth and Cy Young and Ty Cobb, too. They were all part of the game.

Indeed, they were all part of the family—more so than distant cousins and aunts and uncles. We talked about who was better than whom, what Cobb might do if he had to face Maddux, how many homers Ruth would hit today, what Griffey’s OPS might have been against 1920s pitching staffs, that sort of thing. 

In those years I created, with Pete Palmer, Total Baseball, a 10-pound doorstop of a book that now, supplanted by the Internet, seems as quaint as the slide rule. Through 15 years and eight editions, it was the last word on historical records and sabermetric reconfiguration of the raw data.

Today my sabermetric writing lies behind me rather than ahead, and I think I am about ready to say, “Farewell to Stats.”

For a whole generation of fans and fantasy players, stats have begun to outstrip story and that seems to me a sad thing. Even the unverifiable hogwash that passed for fact or informed opinion in baseball circles not so long ago seems today wistfully enticing, for its energy if nothing else.

Where is the pioneering broadcaster Bill Stern now that we really need him? His fabrications were outrageous and, to modern ears, hilarious. But he knew how to grip a reader with a ripping yarn.

OK, maybe Abe Lincoln did not urge Abner Doubleday with his dying breath to “keep baseball alive; America will need it in the trying days ahead.” So what?

Frankly, in today’s baseball writing I miss such Sternian balderdash: the wink and the nudge of a Barnum or the tall-tale bluster of a Davy Crockett. Amid today’s mix of straight-on account and sabermetric analysis, I miss the fun.

For this I could blame Bill James, Pete Palmer and maybe myself a little too. The press has often termed me a sabermetrician, placing me in the company of my betters. In fact I never was a statistician. I just believed that in numbers one might uncover truths not visible to the naked eye, in the way that flying at night a pilot must trust the instrument panel rather than his senses.

Even early on, what interested me more than fiddling with formulas or lobbying for Ron Santo to enter the Hall of Fame was the web of illusion that stats created for fans and players alike, evading the interesting questions of why we measure, what we think we are measuring, what we are truly measuring, and most important, what the measurement means. 

Today I find those questions less gripping. To count the constituent parts of baseball is to run the gamut of the game’s charms from A to B.

A decade ago, when counterintuitive strategy briefly was fashionable, someone thoughtfully provided a list of the all-time leaders in receiving intentional bases on balls with no one on base. This put me in mind of Thoreau’s remark in Walden: “It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.”

Fixate on the particular and you miss the big story. 

While we’re on a quoting jag, there’s Einstein’s “Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts.” True, so true. Yet in an Abner Doubleday twist, there is no evidence that Einstein ever said this. The words were observed on a sign hanging in his office at Princeton and may first have been uttered by … Bill Stern. Or Abner Doubleday.

Tomorrow: Baseball’s old mysteries are revealed in its names and numbers.

John Thorn’s new book, Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game, debunks the myth of Abner Doubleday inventing baseball in Cooperstown and traces the game’s real roots in the 18th century. You can buy it at Amazon. 

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com