The Boston Red Sox really want to beat the Yankees. The team’s president and C.E.O., Larry Lucchino, has declared the Yanks an “evil empire,” and the principal owner, John Henry, speaks of being “destined to knock off Goliath.” Last winter, after a season in which the Sox won ninety-three games—but nonetheless fell short of New York for the seventh straight year—Boston installed a new general manager and replaced more than forty per cent of its roster. Perhaps the club’s most significant personnel move was the signing, to a one-year contract, of a big, lumbering fifty-three-year-old right-hander from Kansas (six feet four, and well over two hundred pounds) who spends far more time on the Little League diamond, where he keeps the stats, than at any big-league ballpark. He is Bill James, a former boiler-room attendant who, almost thirty years ago, set out to debunk the conventional wisdom proffered by television and radio commentators—“baseball’s Kilimanjaro of repeated legend and legerdemain,” as he called it—by using statistical evidence.
In the process, James himself has become part of baseball legend. To some, he’s a philosopher-hero who brought baseball out of the Dark Ages; others consider him a calculator-punching pedant with too much time on his hands. The once proud and conservative Red Sox, by hiring James to be their Senior Baseball Operations Adviser, have joined the ranks of those teams—such as the Oakland A’s and the Toronto Blue Jays—which are now emphasizing the principles of “sabermetrics” as an alternative to the steadfast reliance on weather-beaten scouts with radar guns, hunches, and cigars. (The term, which James coined two decades ago, echoes the acronym for the Society for American Baseball Research, and denotes “the search for objective knowledge about baseball.”) The Red Sox have not merely sided with the brainiacs; they’ve enlisted the help of the founding nerd.
James is a man of many seeming contradictions. He is an English major who has made a name for himself as a math whiz. He has been called the Sultan of Stats, despite arguing that you should “never use a number when you can avoid it.” He is a self-described “scientist,” who frequently reveals little concern for precision, a relentless counter who can’t be bothered with individual sums. James is a rigorously organized thinker who is hopelessly disorganized when negotiating mundane daily responsibilities. He is, he says, a “completely ethical person,” and yet he is obsessed with crime. (“Why the justice system doesn’t work better than it does is to me a topic of great fascination.”) He has long been revered by rationalists for promoting the virtues of objective analysis, and yet, after an extended hibernation from writing about contemporary baseball—during the nineties, he focussed mainly on the history of the game—he reëmerged on the statistical scene with a new metric to define the over-all contribution of each player, whose formula has a built-in “subjective element,” allowing him to adjust the numbers more or less as he pleases. And, after so many years of presenting himself as the consummate outsider, he has now, in middle age, gone inside.
Working for the Red Sox is James’s first regular job since the nineteen-seventies, when he kept an eye on the furnaces at the Stokely Van Camp pork-and-beans plant, in Lawrence, Kansas, about fifty miles from his home town. It was a good job, in that it allowed him a lot of time to keep to himself and think—particularly about baseball, a subject that had preoccupied him since early childhood. A natural skeptic, James had decided never to believe something (that ballplayers peak in their early thirties, say) simply because he’d been told it was so. He was, he said, “a baseball agnostic.” He also hated to let questions linger when the answers could so obviously be measured with just a little—O.K., a lot of—time and patience. Each day, he lugged his Baseball Encyclopedia and a stack of box scores to his boiler-room post, and compiled evidence—that starting pitchers have no effect on attendance, that catchers have a great effect on base stealing (amazingly, this had not previously been apparent), that ballplayers peak, in fact, in their late twenties.
In 1977, he decided to share some of these findings directly with the public. He placed a one-inch ad in the back of The Sporting News, asking three dollars for the “Baseball Abstract: Featuring 18 Categories of Statistical Information That You Just Can’t Find Anywhere Else.” The Abstract was sixty-eight single-sided pages, photocopied and stapled. Only seventy-five people responded, which—even though Norman Mailer and the screenwriter William Goldman were among them—was not exactly the kind of success you quit your job over. Undeterred, James kept at it, and turned the book into an annual. By 1980, the Baseball Abstract looked almost like a real book, with artwork on the cover: an ape, posed as Rodin’s “The Thinker,” contemplating a baseball. A couple of years later, it was a real book, published each spring thereafter by Ballantine.
James wrote that he wanted to approach the subject of baseball “with the same kind of intellectual rigor and discipline that is routinely applied, by scientists great and poor, to trying to unravel the mysteries of the universe, of society, of the human mind, or of the price of burlap in Des Moines.” His books proceeded simply, directly, empirically. He responded to every new statement or unearthed fact with a dozen questions: If this is true, then what must also be true? What are the conditions under which it might not be true? And, if it is true, so what—why should we care? What does it all mean?
Reading Bill James was like taking an advanced course in extemporaneous-debating technique. The prose was colloquial—“manneristically unmannered,” the writer Veronica Geng called it—and full of non-baseball analogies (“The Astros are to baseball what jazz is to music”; “The way that managers have tested the limits of starting pitchers for the last century is quite a bit like the way they used to test for witches, by pond dunking”). Each essay or chapter was clearly outlined, and rife with italics—James’s effort to create what he called “a lighted pathway between the question and the answer.” He could write descriptively, such as when he addressed Pete Rose’s late-career style: “the mad dash to first which has slowed to a furious waddle, the slight, tense quickening of his practice strokes at a key moment of the game, which passes sotto voce a sense of urgency to the dugout behind him, a sense of danger to the one across the way.” And he was almost always funny, if a little cruel. In 1979, James wrote that Art Howe (the current manager of the Mets) “pivoted on the double play almost as well as Bobby Doerr. Doerr was one of the greatest pivot men ever, but he is now sixty-one years old, and he gave up the game some years ago, when he began to pivot like Art Howe.”
But what set the writing apart—and put the Abstract on the Times’ best-seller list—was the accessibility of the logic, the insistence on eliminating biases and ignoring illusions, the practical tone. James’s approach seemed distinctly American, descended from the nineteenth-century pragmatist tradition exemplified by his namesake, the philosopher William James.
Our James brought barstool argument to the page, and enforced a rigid sobriety. He set forth rational, elaborate methods for evaluating greatness, for example, and when he released his “Historical Baseball Abstract,” in 1985, he established a new pecking order for the celebrated baseball players of our time. (Sorry, Catfish Hunter. Step on up, Bobby Grich!) More important, however, James treated his readers to an egghead’s theory of winning baseball, in which outs—the only finite resource—are to be avoided at all costs, and walks (which are outproof) are considered more than just acceptable. Walks are admirable, and on-base percentage, not batting average, is the bedrock of a productive offense.
Baseball insiders—people who played and coached baseball every day—had a tendency to view outs as a necessary by-product of scoring runs. Experience showed them that a sacrifice bunt, properly executed, could lead to a game-tying base hit. They could see it right in front of them. They also remembered instances when the count was three-and-oh and a wanna-be hero, rather than take the walk, delivered a bloop single on a junk pitch, driving the go-ahead run home from second. What they couldn’t see from the dugout—but what James tended to “see” without watching at all, from the boiler room, even—were the things that didn’t happen, or that might have happened, but for the bunt, or for the lunge at a pitch outside the strike zone: the rallies that could put the game out of reach if you’d let the batters hit away instead of handing your opponents an out in the service of a lone score; the batters who accepted a walk, and then came around themselves to score, without risking the lazy fly out that was perhaps five times as likely as the lucky Texas leaguer.
If James’s message was largely ignored by the insiders twenty years ago, a few people who would eventually inhabit the baseball establishment were hooked. John Henry first came across the Abstract in the early eighties, when he was in the process of forming a commodities-trading fund (John W. Henry & Company). He found the analytical, show-me-the-numbers approach compelling, and in keeping with a philosophy he was beginning to apply to the fund, which adhered strictly to historical price-trend analysis. The strategy served Henry well—Money has called him “perhaps the world’s foremost commodities trader”—and in 2001 he was able to use his considerable earnings to help buy the Red Sox, for seven hundred million dollars, the highest amount ever paid for a baseball franchise.
Theo Epstein, the new Red Sox G.M., was a fourth grader at Brookline Elementary School in Brookline, Massachusetts, when he discovered James, in 1984. “I remember reading the Abstract and thinking, God, after reading one book I’ve changed the way I look at the game on the field,” he said the other day, while watching batting practice at Fenway Park. “I never thought that could happen from reading a book.” Epstein was twenty-eight when he was appointed to his post last year, making him the youngest G.M. in baseball history.
Several Jamesians now hold high office in baseball. Billy Beane, a first-round draft pick who began reading back issues of the Abstract after his outfielding career stalled, was named general manager of the Oakland A’s in 1997. Beane presented a non-threatening face—a square jaw, with a mouth full of tobacco—to the nerd agenda, which he began, almost immediately, to implement. In 2001, one of his like-minded deputies, J. P. Ricciardi, was hired to run the Blue Jays. The A’s—does it need mentioning?—have outperformed the Red Sox for three years running, and “Moneyball,” Michael Lewis’s best-selling book about the team’s success, has recently brought extramural fame to Beane and the sabermetric approach.
Late last summer, Henry and Epstein, who was then the assistant G.M., were sitting in a cramped room on the third floor at Fenway, discussing their wish to assemble a front office staffed by people who “get it” (shorthand, essentially, for those who can remember the moment they first read a Baseball Abstract). Joking, Epstein suggested that they hire Bill James himself. Although James had seemed to position himself deliberately on the margins of the profession, Henry sent him an inquiring e-mail, just in case. James had, as it happened, worked in the past as a consultant for three major-league teams, but was forbidden to acknowledge his employment. The baseball fraternity, even though it was curious about what he had to offer, still regarded him as a stats-obsessed freak, and James bristled at authority. “The ways that decisions were made by baseball executives twenty years ago were phenomenal and borderline bizarre,” James told me recently. “And as soon as I began to deal with general-manager-type people I began to realize that I wasn’t one of them. I’m just not the type of person who would thrive inside of an organization as a rule. I always felt that if I ever put myself in a position where I had to wait for someone to say, ‘Oh, here’s a bright young man, why don’t we promote him?,’ I would be waiting one hell of a long time.” And he might well have been, given his tendency to say and write what he thought about the kinds of people who worked inside organizations—“an assortment of half-wits, nincompoops, and Neanderthals like Don Drysdale and Don Zimmer [who] are not only allowed to pontificate on whatever strikes them, but are actually solicited and employed to do this.”
The Red Sox offered James a senior position up front—in effect, a baseball professorship—and, to their surprise, he agreed. James is now responsible for a quarterly report covering various baseball subjects—like a mini-Abstract, with a controlled circulation—and he’ll travel to Boston to keep abreast of the baseball climate on Yawkey Way several times during the year. But, in essence, his job is to foster a “culture of ideas which helps guide the team,” as he put it. “My role is that I tell them what I think whenever they ask me to, and that I tell them what I think whenever I can’t keep my mouth shut.” Often enough, they actually listen.
By the time the Red Sox announced the James hire, in November, he had already filed his first report—eighty-six pages, spiral-bound, assessing the team’s options for the upcoming free-agent market, and demonstrating a “very striking phenomenon,” as he later told me, in which Red Sox teams, thanks to the asymmetries of Fenway Park, have historically tended to succeed in relation to the number of left-handed batters in their lineup. (The more the better—contrary to popular belief, which holds that the Green Monster, an oversized wall barely three hundred feet down the left-field line, makes Fenway a righty’s delight.) Epstein and James were in daily contact during the winter months, as the Red Sox restocked their roster.
In one important sense, James has been preparing for this job all his life. Growing up a fan of the hapless Kansas City A’s, and then, after the A’s moved away, switching to the Royals, he developed a proper hatred of the Yankees. “The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant” (1954), the Faustian tale by Douglass Wallop that inspired the musical “Damn Yankees,” was one of James’s favorite books when he was a teen-ager. James has three children—Rachel, seventeen; Isaac, fifteen; and Reuben, the Little Leaguer, who is nine—and he reads them Wallop’s novel every year. “Kansas City hates New York more than Boston does,” he told me.
Boston fans, like James, are serious skeptics, but their world view is born of bitterness and a deep-seated pessimism. The residents of Red Sox Nation (roughly, New England, north of New Haven) have seen more than enough to be wary of anything presenting itself as new and better: their team hasn’t won the World Series since 1918, despite frequent flirtations (Johnny Pesky, Bucky Dent, Bill Buckner—each name a barb with a vivid and painful memory attached). Dan Shaughnessy, the dean of Boston Globe sportswriters, told me that he’s “dubious” of the James experiment, and that he’d even heard grumbling among the press corps about the possibility of lineups being faxed in daily from Kansas.
In 2001, the year before the Red Sox hired him, James published a revised edition of his Historical Abstract, which included an essay about the evolution of the modern relief pitcher. In it, he questioned the common practice of bringing in an ace “closer” to record just the final two or three outs of a game. Why should managers wait until the ninth inning, and only when they’ve got a lead, to use their best relief pitcher, if the game may well hinge on a bases-loaded situation in the seventh? With the help of a computer simulation, James showed that this amounted to a waste of resources; a run saved during the seventh inning of a tie game, for instance, was much more valuable than, say, a run saved in the ninth with a lead. “Essentially, using your relief ace to protect a three-run lead is like a business using a top executive to negotiate fire insurance,” he wrote.
So when the Red Sox allowed their closer, Ugueth Urbina, to sign with Texas over the winter, and expressed a willingness to try unconventional bullpen assignments—they had a capable committee of relievers who would adapt on the fly—it was not hard to detect James’s influence at work. Traditionalists saw in this the classic tension between science and humanity: sure, it looks good on a computer, but there’s a psychological component to closing a baseball game which can’t be taught. Even before the season started, pundits were griping that the Red Sox were trying to “reinvent the wheel.”
On Opening Day, Boston ran up a 4-1 lead against the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, perennial bottom-dwellers. Pedro Martínez, the Sox’ all-everything starter, departed for the showers in the eighth inning, and ceded control to the bullpen—which in turn ceded the game, unbelievably, to the Devil Rays. Two innings, three pitchers, five runs. Shaughnessy received a message on his answering machine that night from a local grandmother (such is the intensity of Boston sports culture). “I’m seventy-three years old, and I’ve never called before, but I’m so disgusted,” she said. “What’s with this closer-by-committee?”
It was the greatest day in the short history of the Devil Rays franchise (“Nothing else comes close,” Tampa’s spokesman said), and the beginning of a frustrating spring for the Boston Brain Trust. Over the next several weeks, while the Yankees were off to one of the best starts in history, the Committee, as the relief-pitching crew was soon known throughout Red Sox Nation, choked repeatedly, recording along the way an earned-run average that could win a few football games.
Grady Little, the Sox’ manager, began to talk about having visions of his pitchers throwing the ball over the wall. One reliever, Mike Timlin, blamed the full moon for a particularly egregious eighth-inning collapse against the Angels—rational Jamesian stuff. And it certainly didn’t help matters that the Red Sox’ biggest bullpen bogeyman was turning out to be Ramiro Mendoza, whom Boston had plucked away from the Yankees—yes!—in the off-season. Mendoza’s double-digit E.R.A. was being offered as proof that Lucchino was right—the Yankees were evil, and had gone so far as to plant a secret agent inside 4 Yawkey Way.
It is commonly believed in pro-baseball circles that the Yankees have, in effect, two competing front offices—one in New York, headed by Brian Cashman, the general manager, and another in Florida, headed by George Steinbrenner. Not to be outdone, the Red Sox can now be said to have two as well, though they work more or less in tandem. The headquarters are at Fenway, on the third floor, and the annex—the think tank—is some fifteen hundred miles away, in a ramshackle four-room house near the train tracks in Lawrence, where James works. From the outside, the structure appears abandoned; the paint is peeling, and the lawn hasn’t been mowed in a year. Inside, the place is fittingly professorial—musty, with broken furniture, thousands of books (from “The Federalist Papers,” to “Greatest Detectives,” to “Total Baseball”), and boxes of videotapes and old magazines strewn about. An upright piano remains from the previous owner; a Sigmund Freud action figure stands on the mantelpiece, among a dozen or so other statuettes and busts; and a poster offering five hundred dollars for the capture of Jesse James hangs on a wall near the kitchen. (Many of Bill’s relatives claim Jesse as an ancestor, but Bill finds the evidence insufficient.)
I visited James at his office in early May. The night before, an hour’s drive to the east in Kansas City, the Sox had clawed back from a five-run deficit against the Royals and taken the lead in the top half of the ninth—only to squander it, again, in the bottom half. (Hit, walk, hit, plunk, error.) When I arrived, James, who has a salty gray beard, was pacing in his office, barefoot, with his shirt untucked, engaging in the Socratic method with an assistant, Matthew.
“What’s Chen’s best pitch? Mmmhmm. A lefty, right? Are you sure? I could swear . . . What about Seanez? Yes, but wouldn’t you rather have the guy who gets hurt than the guy who can’t get anybody out?”
James stopped pacing and sat down behind his desk, which is next to a small bed—for catnaps and the occasional overnighter. “We’re evaluating a couple of available pitchers”—Bruce Chen and Rudy Seanez—“to see whether they’re less offensive than the bullpen we have,” he explained. “I would say that essentially what I’m doing is trying to visualize a successful career on the end of a career that we’ve had so far.
“We don’t have anything which suggests that one of these pitchers is going to break loose in Fenway,” he continued. “However, nonetheless it is true that in every baseball season you can identify forty pitchers who were pitching ineffectively, changed teams, and started pitching effectively.” James hopes to identify the conditions that may forecast such improvement in the future, and, for this and other studies, he has compiled a database—“a massive file, which I will send to the Red Sox with my next report, which has everybody in the major leagues, how hard they throw, what pitches they throw, and certain other information about them.”
James has long asserted that minor-league statistics are a reliable predictor of major-league performance, like high-school grades for a college career. As we spoke, he stared periodically at a computer screen, where he had pulled up the records of some of the Red Sox’ six farm teams. James e-mails frequently, which is how he communicates with Boston (“I don’t do telephone,” he likes to say), and he relies on the Internet for statistics, but he’s not a Web enthusiast. He can’t—or won’t bother to—find articles that people send him if more than one click is required to read them.
I asked whether pressure from the media and fans was causing the Red Sox to react hastily to the apparent bullpen crisis, given that it was still early in the year, and that bad luck and a small sample size—alarm bells to any good Jamesian—had clearly played a part in making the relief staff seem so inept.
“You presented that as if perception is one thing and reality is another,” James said. “Perception becomes reality. . . . I’m trying desperately to avoid comparing our bullpen to a festering sore—would you get us a Diet Coke from the refrigerator over there?” (Diet soda is the fuel that drives the think tank; there were two cases on the floor in front of his desk, and another in the fridge.) A horn sounded in the distance, and the desk began to shake as a train passed.
James lives within walking distance of the office, which is probably just as well, since he has been meaning to get a new car to replace his dying Honda for more than a year now. His house—a well-appointed but not overly grand Victorian —is just a few blocks from the one-story cottage he shared with his wife, Susan McCarthy, when the Abstract was in its self-published infancy. James met Susan—or Susie, as Abstract readers know her—at the pork-and-beans plant, where she had taken a summer job as a writer of inventory tickets, to pay for college. She is now a professional artist, and she made several of the busts on James’s office mantel.
That evening, James attended the Red Sox-Royals game with his wife and all three kids. He bought cotton candy and peanuts for his daughter, shouted “I got it!” whenever a foul ball came near, and showed Susie how to use the miles-per-hour indicator on the scoreboard to distinguish a fast ball from a change-up. He filled out an All-Star ballot and selected five Red Sox players, prompting Isaac, who is by now well schooled in the merits of eliminating bias, to ask, “Dad, is that because you really believe it or because they’re Red Sox?” James replied, “I really believe it because they’re Red Sox.”
Doug Mirabelli led off the top of the third for Boston with a line drive to the gap in left-center. He chugged down the first-base line—Mirabelli has a plumber’s build—and rounded the bag widely, as if imagining a double, before retreating safely to first. James saw this play immediately in terms of what could have happened, and was relieved. “You know, if he’d been a little faster, he’d have been thrown out at second,” he said. Grady Little evidently wished that Mirabelli had, in fact, been a little faster and gone for the double, and he decided to give up an out to make it so: Johnny Damon laid down a bunt and Mirabelli moved over to second. James winced. The Sox got the one run that Little had been seeking. Fortunately, Boston continued to hit, and in the sixth, after the lead-off man reached base again, they eschewed sacrifices and walked and singled their way through a four-run rally, good enough to provide the cushion they needed. Final score: Red Sox 7, Royals 3.
The following day, the Red Sox acquired Bruce Chen, and the day after that they added Rudy Seanez.
It was the second week of June before James went to Boston for the first time this season, and the Sox had managed, despite erratic play and the dreaded bullpen, briefly to claim first place in the division by half a game. The Yankees were suffering from a mid-season freefall—Steinbrenner was thought to be contemplating a pink slip for the sainted manager Joe Torre—and, whatever the pitching woes, the off-season additions to the Red Sox lineup had the team set to challenge the franchise record for runs scored.
Interleague play now brought the St. Louis Cardinals to town for the first time since the fall of 1967, when Bob Gibson defeated the Red Sox in the seventh game of the World Series, thereby continuing Boston’s championship drought, which, at that point, was already five decades old. Before the game, James showed me around the Fenway front office, which is divided into two wings. One, he explained, was full of “people just a few years out of college, who dress casually, work really hard, and are really smart.” Theo Epstein is among these. “Down the hall, there are people who are my age, who dress really well, and are also smart, but they don’t work quite as hard,” James said. These include holdovers from the pre-John Henry era. When James had arrived at the stadium that morning, dressed, as usual, in a polo shirt and chinos, he’d found a vacant desk in the kids’ wing and plugged in his laptop.
By five o’clock, he was on his sixth Diet Coke. He looked up the bullpen’s E.R.A.—5.77, or thirtieth out of thirty teams—as he does once a day. “I worry about it more and more,” he said, and walked down to the field to watch batting practice. That night, the Red Sox rallied late to tie the Cardinals, 7-7, heading into the ninth. Brandon Lyon, who had become the default closer (Committee be damned), entered the game and promptly yielded two doubles and a base hit. The Cards won, 9-7.
James and his younger colleagues stayed in the office until after 1 a.m. that night, determined, he said the next day, to “work the problem to death.” One option was to acquire a particular tall left-handed pitcher who was said to be available. Someone had floated the theory that tall lefties were apt to be unusually effective at Fenway, where a ball being released from high off the right side of the pitcher’s mound would be obscured by the backdrop of fans’ T-shirts in the right-center-field bleachers, thus delaying batters’ reactions for a vital split second. Epstein asked James to check it out, so he did what he does better than anyone else—he devised a quick study. He identified thirty-six lefties, going back to 1987, who had won at least one game in the American League, and who were six feet five or taller. Of those, perhaps twenty-five had pitched in Fenway. He then compared those pitchers’ performances in the park and away from it—and concluded, alas, that there was insufficient evidence to support the theory. Another myth debunked. Oh, well.
The next day, Pedro Martínez, who had been been out with a sore shoulder, returned from the disabled list, and the Red Sox—with a lineup featuring six left-handed batters—knocked out nineteen hits to win by 13-1. The Yankees, meanwhile, were being no-hit by the Astros, down in the Bronx. James stuck around to watch the end of that stunner on TV with Epstein and some others and then walked back to his hotel with a smile. “This is just about a perfect baseball day,” he said. “I don’t know that it gets better than this.”
Despite his struggle to help heal the suffering bullpen, James was not hired merely to react to the daily dilemmas that befall a baseball club. The Culture of Ideas is not meant to produce a set of Band-Aids; it is meant to prevent certain kinds of wounds altogether. One goal that James and company are working toward involves identifying worrisome physiological and stylistic traits among pitchers that lead predictably to injury. James also spends a fair amount of time each week trying to project a future without Martínez or the All-Star shortstop Nomar Garciaparra, both of whom have expensive contracts coming up for renegotiation in fifteen months. Each will be in his early thirties, and thus past his peak, according to Jamesian law.
“What I’m trying to do is to create ways to think about the real problems of baseball front offices in an organized way,” James had told me earlier in the spring. “I’ve actually had some really interesting insights into the game and developed some very interesting methods in the few months that I’ve worked for the Red Sox, and it’s very frustrating not to be able to discuss them with the public.” Frustrating for the public, too, or at least for the more scholarly fans, who can no longer feel so confident that they are on the cutting edge.
Epstein was grateful to have James in town, to test ideas on him, and to give him a sense of how the team operates. But he reminded me that such familiarity has its drawbacks as well. “That’s where Bill being in Kansas and having his theoretical background is an advantage,” Epstein said. “He’s not bogged down by the day-to-day grind of being with a baseball team and sort of losing the forest for the trees, you know?”
Back in Lawrence, Bill James is keeping to himself, thinking, trying to construct a better understanding of the world outside baseball. He turns on c-span—which he watches more than any other channel—and finds another politician lying, thus presenting the kind of puzzle that he has been trying to solve all his life: “You have to try to reconstruct the organization of their thoughts so that it reaches the point of defending the absurd proposition that they are defending, and then try to reconstruct the organization of your own thought, so that you have a place to put the true fact which is consistent with your underlying belief.” He decides to revisit the manuscript of a book about famous crime cases, which he’s been working on for years: “I think about writing as much as I think about baseball. The issues of why people believe what they believe and how you persuade them to see things your way are extremely interesting and extremely critical to me.” He thinks back to past losses by the Kansas University basketball team that still nettle him (he’s taped all their tournament games, and gone back over them, frame by frame, making a log of each possession): “I have this horrible compulsion to understand what happened.” Before long, he begins to daydream, and his thoughts return, as always, to baseball, and to the Yankees: “All of the dreams I have in which we are successful are dreams in which we succeed in reducing the Yankees to a more appropriate stature in life.” Later, he will resume his nightly routine of reading “The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant” to Reuben—for what he hopes is the last time.
I keep thinking, however, about an e-mail that James sent me after I visited him in Kansas, in which he tried to explain the connection between his obsession with crime stories and baseball. “I feel a need to be reminded, day in and day out, how easy it is for a fantasy to grab hold of your foot like a rope, and dangle your life upside down while brigands go through your pockets,” he wrote. “The essential message of crime books is: Deal with the life you’ve got. Solve the problems you have, rather than fantasizing about a life without them.”
Tomorrow, the bullpen awaits. ♦
