Mailbag - My Conversation With George
by Asher B. Chancey, Baseball Evolution
February 27, 2006
Mr. Chancey, I would like to start out by saying that your take on Bill
James reflects everything that I have been thinking for years, that his
fatal weak point is that of consistency without which his waxing poetic
about things seems just subjective in the extreme. I have not read recent
work by Mr. James ( because, to be frank, his works are so
pseudo-scientific that it really perturbs me to no end ), but have enough
of his previous work to analyze his methodology. The main thing here is
that Mr. James has a limited knowledge of mathematics and logical thinking,
and uses what he knows to justify gut feelings and prejudices. A good case
in point is when he basically crucifies Haywood Sullivan of nepotism in
playing his son Marc, but Mr. James does essentially the same thing when he
lets his wife, a professional illustrator but a lousy artist, do the
pictures in his book. ( By the way, he is rather generous to George Sisler
in his first Historical abstract..... ) Anyhow, just wanted to thank you
for your efforts in pointing out fallacies in such. Please continue the
good work!
Best Regards,
George
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
George,
It was great to hear from you. It is good to know that there are others
out there who can see past the universal praise generally heaped on Bill
James and realize that his analysis is fundamentally flawed in many ways.
You are right, of course, about Sisler. James seems to pride himself for
having "come to his senses" on Sisler, as he ranked him 32nd in his first
list, and not at all on his recent Top 100, but I generally prefer to think
that he was closer on Sisler in the 1980s than he is now.
Another thing that Bill James does is routinely discredit players he
doesn't like if they were big RBI guys, stating repeatedly that RBI are
overrated, that sportswriters are in love with RBI, etc., but then when he
is talking about players whom he likes, he will routinely point out their
RBI accomplishments.
I didn't know that about Haywood Sullivan, or James' wife for that matter
(those pictures are in fact not very good, are they). But, since you don't
have the recent abstract, I wanted to point out another nepotism example to
you - James ranks Mark McGwire as the third greatest First Baseman of all
time, behind Gerhig and Foxx (I personally put Greenberg, Bagwell, Thomas,
and Mize ahead of him). His comment on McGwire is three sentences long. The
first sentence is "My seven-year old son's favorite player."
Apparently, his "son's favorite player" is part of his ranking system he
hasn't quite disclosed to us.
Anyway, thanks so much for sending your comment. It's nice to know that I
am not shouting at the wind when I take James to task.
Hope all is well,
Asher
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hello, Mr. Chancey!
I am glad to hear from you!
Thank you for pointing out Mr. James assesment of Mark McGwire; heck, Ralph
Kiner was pretty much Mark McGwire I, with more consistency.
Context is something that is always difficult to acertain, to be sure, but
Mr. James has done a remarkable job of interpreting things piece-wise to
form a certainly unsynergestic whole. Although people have been slow to
realize the deficiencies in Mr. James' work, it will not be long before
individuals with the appropriate training and/or frame of mind puts things
in a more rational perspective.
However, compared to the likes of Joe Morgan, Mr. James is enlightened,
indeed!
Please keep up the work!
Best Regards,
George
PS: Personally, Rogers Hornsby and Eddie Collins rate ahead of Joe Morgan.
Another person who I saw that has been panned by many is Bobby Bonds, but
he does not deserve the reputation that he has, that of a complaining and
malingering player. I was there at Candlestick when he came up, and
actually heard Willie Mays give him "advice" to be indifferent to fans and
such, but he really was a model of class to fans at that time. Many years
later, at the down-turn of his career, I saw him again after a loss. Though
obviously tired and being peppered with abuse from the so-called "fans", he
actually recognized me and came over to say "Hello". When I mentioned to
him that I always appreciated him giving his all for the team and too bad
these jackasses couldn't tell, he actually gave me a hug and said "Thank
you. That really means a lot to me." Class. It is most unfortunate that his
sensitivity affected his ball-playing, but it made him a better human
being. This is one reason I will never criticize Barry Bonds for being
surly and aloof, because he saw his father go through the sort of abuse
that most of us will never encounter.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
George -
"However, compared to the likes of Joe Morgan, Mr. James is enlightened, indeed!"
HA! That is wonderful! One of the great subtlties of James's recent book is that he is totally enamoured of Morgan as a player, but definitely aware of what a windbag he is as an announcer. And he spends time on it.
The great thing about Joe Morgan (and there are actually several) is that he has totally dismissed Moneyball, and the Billy Beane style of analyzing baseball (ignore average, focus on outs made, walks taken, power) without really noticing that he is exactly the type of player who benefits from this sort of analysis! Only because Bill James can ignore Morgan's ridiculously low average and appreciate his "secondary average" can he rank Morgan as the greatest second baseman of all time. And yet Morgan dismisses Moneyball and Billy Beane as being hogwash. Now, obviously Morgan was a basestealer, and Beane hates basestealers, but other than that, Billy Beane would love to have Joe Morgan on his team.
The second great thing about Joe Morgan is that one does not have to be told what a windbag he is. I remember watching Sunday Night Baseball as a 14 year old kid and thinking to myself that Joe Morgan is full of hot air. I really wonder how Jon Miller has put up with him so much. There are no fewer than 10 times a night that Joe Morgan will say something or make some observation which is simply dead wrong, and usually self-gratifying.
"I remember talking with my great friend Hank Aaron about . . . "
Pah-lease.
"Personally, Rogers Hornsby and Eddie Collins rate ahead of Joe Morgan."
See? You get it. I get it. Why doesn't Bill James get it. James dogs Hornsby because he was mean, and because second base was a different kind of position in Hornsby's day. I am sure he even dismisses his numbers because he played in the 1920s, an incredible offensive era. Okay. That's fine. What I want to know is, How do you dismiss the fact that Hornsby dominated the National League in the 1920s leading the league in, amongst many other things, OPS every year except one from 1920 to 1931. He was simply THE dominant player of the National League for a decade. And frankly, I put that ahead of Morgan. But whatever.
As for Bobby Bonds, that is an incredibly story. I, as you may have seen on the website, am a HUGE Andre Dawson fan, and thus I latched on to the 300-300 (HR/SB) club as a kid as it is Andre's surest achievement which connects his name to Willie Mays. Anyone who is 300-300 is okay in my book (which means I will soon have to start admiring Steve Finley).
Anyway, for YEARS I went around telling people that Andre Dawson and Willie Mays were the only members of the 300-300 club, because I had heard it repeatedly said that they were. When Barry Bonds joined the club, there were even reports that he was the third member of the club.
But then a strange thing happened. One day I happened upon Bobby Bonds' stats and, oddly enough, HE TOO was a member of the 300-300 club! How could this be? How had I never known this? Why didn't ANYONE seem to know this?
Isn't it odd that we had found a way to essentially wipe Bobby Bonds from our memory banks? He had become the invisible man. Only when Barry started becoming talked about as one of alltime greats did Bobby Bonds really come back into our collective conscience. (In my opinion).
I really don't see how Bobby Bonds could possibly NOT be a Hall of Famer. Actually, I do - his career went downhill prematurely, and he struck out an awful lot - but he should still be in. His OPS numbers are good, ESPECIALLY for a leadoff guy, he didn't hit into double plays at all. In his prime he was a very good base stealer, and his homerun numbers were excellent for his era. It also appears that he was a rather good outfielder. Unfortunately, there are only 900 good rightfielders in baseball history, which muddles things. But, if you think of Bobby Bonds as a leadoff hitter, he is simply one of the most productive leadoff hitters that I can think of.
I am really glad you told me that story, because it does provide a very good context for both Bondses. You are right, it is a little easier to go easy on Barry in light of what he saw his dad go through with fans and media.
So, I assume you are from the Bay area?
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
I lived near SF in the late 60's when my father was stationed in Vietnam.
He ended up retiring there ( Fairfield ), and we had a house there until
recently. Baseball caught my imagination as a pre-teen in the mid-sixties,
but I liked the historical aspects more, so I went to fewer games than I
might have otherwise. I bought an address list of retired ballplayers and
wrote them a lot, asking for information ( I sure wish I had not lost the
responses..... ).
Anyhow, I was there for the Swingin' A's phenomenon, and saw a lot. One of
the things was how the SF Giants' people screwed up Bobby Bonds' head with
contradicting advice ( Same thing they did with Dave Kingman..........he
was making progress when they asked him to just go for the fences, and his
career went astray. He was much better than his reputation, also. ). I
really think that Willie Mays, who BB really looked up to, affected him in
a bad way. At the end of his career, Mays was just so surly and such, so
much that he would make Albert Belle seem like a social worker by
comparision, and this just had to have bad consequences for BB. Willie
McCovey was always trying to tone down things, but it wasn't enough.
Well, I am very glad to have heard from you!
As always,
George.
Disagree with something? Got something to add? Wanna bring up something totally new? Asher B. Chancey resides in Alexandria, Virginia, and can be reached at asher@baseballevolution.com.
