To Jed and all his Kin

            Perhaps you saw the Headnote on the front page.   Sometime soon, we are thinking the middle of September, we are going to close Bill James Online, and I am going to focus on other projects.  

            First of all, thank you for asking, my health is fine.   To the best of my knowledge I’m not dying any faster than the rest of you.  My worst health problem is that my beard needs trimming. 

            To put the reasons for the shutdown into one sentence, it would be that I want to focus on writing books.  This website consumes so much of time and energy that I have found it impossible to focus on other projects.   Not ALL of my "other projects" are books, but let’s stay with that, because you can’t stop exercising and you can’t stop walking your dog; those things are not options.  I’m not retiring, or anything crazy like that. 

            Or to put the reasons for the shutdown into one different sentence, we have pushed the economic insanity of this as far as we can push it.  I don’t know how much I have earned for the hours I have put into this over the years, but I can tell you great confidence that is nowhere near the minimum wage.  Actually, LOTS of people who blog about baseball and other stuff aren’t making anywhere near the minimum wage either, and God bless them, but when you have better options, then the decision to put your time into THIS, rather than THAT, amounts to working for negative money.   A sensible man can only do that for so long, not that I am claiming to be a sensible man.  A sensible man would have done this ten years ago.  

            Or to put the reasons for the shutdown in a different sentence, you have to understand that I am TERRIBLE businessman.  I mean, I’m awful.  I have had many opportunities over the years to supervise other people, edit them, organize them, etc.   I have failed on every occasion when I had the opportunity to do this.   I have made a good living anyway, because I do have some virtues, and John Dewan and Rylan Edwards and Theo Epstein and other people have been kind enough to spackle over some of my failings and continue to work with me, but I’m just telling you:  I ain’t no businessman.   The position I am in here, running a theoretically profit-making enterprise like Bill James Online, requires several abilities that I just don’t seem to have.  Sorry. 

            Bill James Online has not been a failure on all levels.  I started this project to have a place to publish my ideas, my research, my work. . . a place to publish all that without having to deal with no annoying editor, lawyer, publicist or other person.   That’s been a complete success.   I mean, maybe what I should have figured out sooner is that it is the editors, lawyers, publicists and other annoying people who know how to make money by your writing, but on the simplest level, I HAVE been able to publish whatever fool drivel came into my head, with no interference from anybody.  This has been great, for me.  I have absolutely loved that part of it. 

            And also, I believe. . .and this is just my opinion. . .but I believe that I have done the best work of my career here.  What I do is, I come up with ideas, I develop them up to a point, and then I release them.   I push them out of the nest; they’re on their own.

            At certain points of my career, many, many people have developed an interest in my ideas, and many hundreds of people have picked up one of my ideas or several of my ideas and developed them into mature, productive concepts, products, businesses or research efforts.   That was very gratifying.  I shouldn’t say it was; it still happens, and it still is.     

            That hasn’t really happened here, at least to the same extent.   It has happened SOMETIMES, a little bit, here and there, but most of the ideas first outlined here have floated quietly past the city in the middle of the night.   That’s disappointing, but it’s not THAT disappointing.   I don’t assess the value of my own ideas by how many people react to them immediately and in what way.   I’ve had silly ideas that became famous; I have had great ideas that nobody ever said a word about.   I still believe in those orphaned ideas.   The hook may find a fish eventually.  If it doesn’t, well. . .I’ve done OK.  I’m sure any person who produced ideas for a living would say the same thing; I am sure they ALL left behind them a few thousand orphaned ideas.  I am sure that Don Draper died with a thousand ideas for great commercials that never got made.  It’s normal. 

            And you have to understand:  I worked more or less in isolation for a long time before my ideas caught fire.  I developed my ideas for several years before I began writing about them.  I wrote about them for several years before I was picked up by a national publisher.  Then we had a period of ten to twenty years in which people like us were getting organized, getting together, making progress on what we are doing, but the dominant establishment of the game hated us, hated our work, and denounced and insulted us regularly.  

            I’m used to being ignored.  My childhood prepared me for that.   I mean, I enjoy it when people adopt my ideas, advance them, celebrate them.  I also enjoy a good movie, a good book, a Red Sox game or a Kansas Jayhawk basketball game or a glass of wine.   What’s important to me is that I had the chance to say what I had to say.   BJOL has not been a failure because the world did not pick up on my ideas in the way that I might have hoped.

            And the other thing is, and I guess this is really the bigger thing, that I have had the opportunity to interact with my audience in ways that are intellectually productive.   It is YOUR ideas that have made this phase of my career productive from my standpoint. 

            It frustrates me that people still imagine that sabermetrics is about statistics.   Sabermetrics doesn’t have anything at all to do with statistics, and we don’t use numbers any more than a doctor does, or an architect, or an economist.   What do you think doctors do?  They create ways to measure things, things about your body, things about your health.  They have reference to thousands and thousands and thousands of statistics that the medical community has created about every little part of your body, the thickness of the walls of your heart and the amount of iron in your blood and the amount of nitrogen in your blood and the amount of every other known substance that can be found in your blood or your hair or your sweat or saliva.  If you want to know how many days of your life you could be expected to lose if you put on 1.7 pounds, your doctor could tell you if he wanted to, because of the hundreds of studies done by other doctors.   This is what we do.  We measure everything that we can conceivably come up with to measure, so that we can answer questions like "If the first baseman moves one step to his left against right-handed hitters, how many hits would that save over the course of a season?"  If you would rather have a doctor who pats you on the back and says "You’re lookin’ great, Charley," good luck to you.

            Yes, we use statistics a lot.  A painter uses a paint brush, we might say, every time that he paints.  (I know that some painters don’t.  Don’t patronize me.)  A painter uses a paint brush with every painting that he paints, but when you interview a painter, you ask him about his paintings, not about his paint brushes.   What is your favorite paint brush?  How many paint brushes do you own?  Where do you buy your paint brushes?  Who gave you your first paint brush?  When did you fall in love with paint brushes?  How old were you when you got your first paint brush?  What company makes the best paint brushes, do you think?  What makes a great paint brush?  Do you only use pencil-thin paint brushes, or do you start with a wide brush?  Do you think beaver hair makes the best paint brush, or camel hair?  How do you feel about plastic bristles in a paint brush, are those OK with you, or are you a purist who only uses paint brushes made from nature?  Do you like the feel of a plastic paint brush handle, or do you only use wood?  Do you collect antique paint brushes?   Do you like a short, stiff bristle, or a soft bristle?  If you are painting something green, do you like to use a green paint brush?  Because my Aunt June, when she paints a rose, she likes to use a red paint brush. 

            There are a million questions you COULD ask a painter about paint brushes, but this is not what we usually do.  We usually talk about the paintings, not the paint brushes.  I am a landscape painter who has spent his life answering questions about paint brushes.   My paintings—that is, the conclusions of my studies--are treated by many in the media as if they were accidental outcomes that arose from having so many paint brushes in the room.  It will wear on your nerves a little bit. I started BJOL in large part to have a place I could go to discuss the issues I care about with people who have some understanding of the issues.  On that level and for the most part, this site has been a tremendous success.  What I have most enjoyed, what I think most of you have most enjoyed, is the questions.  

            What I live for is to find a good question.   A good question has three elements:  (1) that there is an answer, (2) that I do not know what the answer is, better yet if no one knows what the answer is, and (3) that it makes a difference, that there is some situation in baseball in which someone would behave differently if he or she knows the answer than if they do not. 

            In "Hey, Bill" maybe one question in 50 is a good question, and yes, there are morons among you who insist on asking me questions about paint brushes, excuse me, statistics.  But a good question will make my life meaningful for two hours or two weeks.  It keeps me going.   It will keep me from sleeping at night, true, but it will keep me from sleeping through the morning. 

            In the approximately 1,000 weeks that I have been answering "Hey, Bill" questions, you have given me hundreds of good questions.  Those questions, and the work I have done to find the answers to them, will be a part of my work for as long as I am able to work.   I hope to have the time now to do another version of The Historical Abstract—not that that is #1 on my list of books I am trying to focus on—but I do hope to get to that.  If I do, you will be in there.  The questions you have asked me will be in there.   You have brought to my attention questions that I was too blind to see for myself.  You have led me to focus on issues that were hiding under rocks, hiding under second base, hiding behind the left field wall and hiding in the dugout runway.   This has been of immense value to me, and I appreciate it.   But now I need to take the gifts that you have given me, and put them in a place where we will hope that a few more people will see them.