The Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers From 1870 to Today Bill James Scribner, 1997 One of the bad results of writing these baseball book reviews is that I now have one thing on my mind everytime I'm reading a baseball book for the first time--"How am I going to start off the review?" Well, almost immediately I decided my lead for this review was going to be, "Bill James tried to duplicate the success and style of his Historical Abstract in his newest book, The Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers From 1870 to Today. But he only managed to duplicate the style sadly. This book just doesn't measure up to his previous efforts."

As I said, that WAS how I was going to start out this review, but the deeper and deeper I delved into this book, the more I began to like it. It turned out to be one of those rarest of baseball reads--a book that I couldn't put down until I had read it cover to cover without stopping.

"The average fan has a one-dimensional image of a manager," writes James in the introduction to this book. "He's good or he's bad. If he's real good, he's a genius. If he's real bad, he's an idiot." By writing this book, James wanted to help correct this--in The Guide to Baseball Managers, he attempts to set up a logical system of evaluating and comparing managers across the ages.

Just as in all his other books and writings, the James sly humor is in full force. From an article in the book on 1800s manager and playing star Cap Anson:

Most of the time (Anson) allowed the first pitch to go by; some accounts insist that he almost never swung until there were two called strikes on him, although the advantage in this would be hard for even Ted Williams to explain.

And as in his other writings, James is never afraid to express an opinion that flies against everything that is considered right in baseball tradition. One point that James tries to make over and over again in the book is that the batting order, while it is one of the things that managers do that fans focus on the most, really doesn't make much difference over the course of a season.

...given a set of twenty-five players, there are 741,354,768,000 (741 billion, 354 million, 768 thousand) different ways to choose nine players from those 25...On the one hand, you have the barroom experts, the traditional sportswriters, the couch potatoes, and the call-in show regulars, all of whom believe that batting orders are important. And then, on the other hand, you have a few of us who have actually studied the issue, and have been forced to draw the conclusion that it doesn't make much difference what order you put the hitters in, they're going to score just as many runs one way as another.

Of course, James goes on to prove his point by using a computer simulation of the 1930 Cubs, one of the best-hitting teams of all time. He bats Hack Wilson, their best hitter, in the ninth spot, puts the pitcher in the leadoff position, and then staggers all the other lethal hitters in a random order throughout the lineup, trying his best to limit their run-producing abilities. After playing 16,200 games with this "illogical" lineup, James shows that though Wilson lost some RBIs because of his ninth spot, other hitters in the lineup had no choice but to make up for these runs.

The book is divided up in much the same way as James' aforementioned classic The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract. Each chapter covers one decade in baseball history starting with the 1870s. At the start of each chapter, James then gives a few common facts about managers in that decade--who was the most successful (of course he has his own formula), who was the least successful, what was the cleverest move, what was the most second-guessed move. As is his wont, James throws in a lot of obscure anecdotes that help to prove his points and move the book along. James then focuses on the most successful managers in each decade, asking lots of questions about their platoon usage, bullpen routine, ability with youngsters, reliance on veterans, etc.

Of course, at the end of The Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers From 1870 to Today, James has to give his own solution to the age-old question of "How do we evaluate managers?" He comes up with a set of statistics that he says could be put on the back of any baseball card and that would within a few years help everyone better understand the role of managers and how one compares to another. "You look at the back of a manager's card today," James says, "and it will tell you that he hit .238 at Pittsfield in 1971. It doesn't have anything to do with how he manages."

As I said above, I started out not caring for this book. I think part of the reason for that is that James does the book in chronological order and he simply does not have as much information to relate about managers of the 1870s and 80s, so the book is not as interesting in these opening parts. But I eventually came to the conclusion that this book definitely belongs alongside James' other classics such as The Politics of Glory and The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract. This is highly recommended reading.

--JingleBob, July 5, 1999

The Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers From 1870 to Today may be available for purchase on the net at one of these sites.

© 1999 JC White