Creating Baseball fiction with numbers (Bill James)
As many of you know, Jack Kerouac had a very similar obsession, and I have met at least two younger people, both of them very successful writers, who confessed to doing the same thing, although I can’t share their names with you because they are public people and I don’t know that they want this information to be on the record. I don’t actually know why I am compelled to do this. I know that every day, when my mind gets jumbled up and my thoughts get tied in a knot, I switch over to Excel and create a couple of fictional players as a way of letting off steam. Some of my ways of creating these fictions are very quick; others are tremendously slow. Sometimes I will work for a week at creating a fictional baseball player, only to realize as I reach the solution to the puzzle that I have made some very basic mistake hours earlier or days earlier so that the player’s career turns out to be a mess that doesn’t resemble anything an actual career could be. It is like a soufflé that doesn’t rise or a desert that doesn’t jell; the resulting player’s career does not meet the basic conditions of the exercise, and so the effort does not scratch that itch that I am perpetually trying to satisfy, whatever that is. I don’t have any interest in superhero movies and am completely bored by them, but I suspect that what I get out of this stuff may be similar to what others get out of superhero movies.
I do feel guilty about the many thousands of hours that I have spent doing this, but I will also note that doing this has occasionally yielded professional benefits for me. I do in fact design and publish real-life record books for baseball players, and have done real encyclopedias; knowing how to do that is related to doing this. One of the happy accidents of my career is that I used to create projected records for players. . . in other words, a record showing what Lorenzo Cain will do in 2016. Whereas I think of most of what I do as a kind of scientific undertaking, I thought of THAT as just messing around, a part of my obsession more than a part of my work. But when I was pushed (against my will) to actually publish those projections, we discovered to my surprise that there was substantial public interest in them, and other people almost immediately started publishing their own projections to compete with mine. That was 30 years ago, and every real major league baseball team now uses projections of one kind or another to try to see what their team will look like before the season. When you think about it. . .well, of course they do; how can you do any kind of planning or detailed preparation for the season if you don’t have some idea of what it is that you expect each player to do?
Creating fictional careers requires a detailed understanding of the shape of actual careers. You have to understand what normal ratios are. You can’t give a player 86 games played and 416 at bats, because that isn’t a normal ratio, although there were some players in the 19th century who had ratios like that. You can create a player who doesn’t reach his peak until he is 32 years old and then is good until he is 36, but you have to understand how tremendously unusual that is. Probably the last star player who didn’t reach his prime until he was 32 years old was Mike Cuellar, forty-some years ago, although if I were to publish that fact no doubt the readers would turn up somebody else.
