The Sabermetric Project and the “Science of Words”

Josh Levin considered something like this back in 2003, in a piece he wrote for Slate. In his article, he asks a simple question: Why doesn’t football have a Bill James?

Aaron Schatz of Football Outsiders answered the question ably, stating that “baseball analysis exists as it does today because Bill James is one of the people who, in American intellectual history, is a force of nature.”

Levin is smart enough to recognize some other obvious reasons as to why baseball analysis has proliferated. Like, for example, that baseball is older, and also that, being a turn-based game, it lends itself more to quantitative analysis.

Still, it’s a fact: especially in the early years of the Abstract, when he was writing and publishing his annual almost entirely by himself, James’ output was incredible. For not only was he doing all that junk on his own, but he was, more or less, inventing a genre of literature.

via www.fangraphs.com