Michael Lewis’s wonderful 2003 Book, Moneyball, is not about conspiracy theories at all. It is about a faction of baseball fans and team managers who changed the game in the late 1990s by rigorously applying statistical analysis to players’ performance. One of the heroes of the book is a guy from Kansas named Bill James, who, in 1977, began publishing an annual analysis of game statistics called the Baseball Abstract. He sold 85 copies of the first edition in its first year. By 1988 he was selling the thing by the truckload. Then he stopped. But his ideas eventually caught on, and meanwhile he had a certain special feeling to keep him warm.
The central argument of James’s writing was that the people running baseball were ignoring the plain truth of the game. The skills that were valued by team managers were not useful; the skills that were useful were not valued. Bill James spent countless thousands of hours poring over stats until he could measure the...
Paul Wells is a senior writer for Maclean’s magazine. He wrote two books about Stephen Harper.
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