Ballpark Figures the Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract Villard; 721 Pages; $24.95 the Bill James Baseball Abstract 1986

By John Leo

To hear many baseball writers tell it, Bill James is the national pastime's absentminded professor, a slightly bewildered numbers-crunching cult figure who rattles on about such arcana as the Brock6 system, Pythagorean projections and the devil's theory of park effects. The reason is that they find it hard to believe a bearded pseudo-academic, squirreled away with pad and pencil in Kansas, could possibly know more about the game than veteran beat writers, who & regularly trade locker-room gibes with Reggie and Pete and get to provide ringside coverage of Billy Martin's bouts with marshmallow salesmen.

Alas, it is true. James is a rare combination of amateur logician and sociologist, stylist, humorist and stern moralist. In fact, much of the joy of reading him comes from the extravagant spectacle of a first-rate mind wasting itself on baseball. Is baseball 75% pitching? No, it isn't, and James will show in a page or so that the proposition makes no more sense than saying "Philosophy is 75% God." Are the good teams the ones that bear down in the crucial final innings? No. The Cardinals and Blue Jays would still have won their divisions last year if all games had ended after the fourth inning. Does AstroTurf shorten the careers of ballplayers? No. Pain and grumpiness are the usual by-products of attempting to simulate baseball on a surface of green concrete. In fact, players whose home parks use artificial turf have longer careers.

All this is the result of true obsession (James says he thinks about baseball "virtually every waking hour of my life"), and the results of this continuing affliction emerge annually as the Baseball Abstract. Though less compelling than some of its nine predecessors, this year's version includes some refreshing observations on the overrating of the Cardinals' rookie outfielder, Vince Coleman, a long and brilliant account of the managerial chess game played at the 1985 world series, and a mordant treatise on the beloved and blinkered manager Chuck Tanner, who somehow failed to notice that his Pittsburgh Pirates clubhouse had turned into a drug den (beat reporters, please copy).

James never forgets that baseball is supposed to be fun. His Historical Abstract, a playful decade-by-decade romp through baseball's past, picks the best and worst in many unlikely categories, including the logical selection of former Pitcher Don Mossi as the ugliest major leaguer of all time. Along the way, James explains why insulting nicknames, like that of Hugh ("Losing Pitcher") Mulcahy, tended to disappear in the '40s, how the coach's box evolved as an attempt to reduce violence in the days when baseball was a blood sport, and why the fatal beaning of Ray Chapman in 1920 may have done more than Babe Ruth to usher in the modern long-ball era. (Because of Chapman's death, the owners replaced the traditionally scuffed, dirty baseballs with shiny new ones that could be seen better--and hit farther. Rabbit was not ; added to the ball until 1925.)

One of the basic premises of James and his fellow sabermetricians (from the acronym for the Society for American Baseball Research) is that one-run strategies (including sacrifice bunts and stolen bases) are usually pointless. A corollary of this premise is that major league managers, with the exception of Earl Weaver and a few others, do not know what they are doing, a fact that makes anti-James feeling somewhat understandable. Baseball research is in its infancy, and much of it is slapdash. But the numbers suggest that the sabermetricians are on the right track and that baseball faces the galling prospect of falling in line with provincial researchers like Bill James. Who knows? James may yet get to throw out the first ball at a world series.