Pushkin. I spend a lot of my life walking into complicated situations and trying to figure out who really knows what's going on, who the expert is. It's not always easy to tell. But there was one time when it was easy. This was back in two thousand and two. I just decided to write a book about something truly weird happening in professional baseball. People with a talent for analyzing data were proving that people who ran baseball teams didn't really know what they were doing. What was happening in baseball was the first shot in an expert revolution. We're still living in it. It goes by different names, big data, analytics, moneyball. You may not look like a winning team, but you are one. Back in two thousand and two, it was instantly clear who the expert was. His name was Bill James. He lived in Lawrence, Kansas, and so to Lawrence, Kansas I flew, and I remember two things about that encounter. The first was his manner. How unlike a revolutionary he seemed. He was big, with a beard like a bear, but a slow moving one that only ate plants. He was slow, and deliberate and unassuming. He had every reason to see himself as the world's greatest expert in baseball. But that's not how he saw himself. The other thing I remember was the picture on the wall by his desk, a picture of a baseball diamond. He pointed to it and said, that's a field of ignorance. Bill James could have bassed in what he knew about baseball, but he made a point to remind himself of what he didn't know. I'm Michael Lewis. Welcome back to Against the Rules, where we explore unfairness in American life by looking at what's happened to various characters in American life. This season is all about experts. Our first episodes looked into the ways that people do or do not understand experts. Now we're going to talk about how experts do and do not understand themselves. Our entire society is like baseball was when I wandered in to write a book about it. We have this talent for generating new knowledge, which we proceed to ignore. This was Bill James's experience for much of his life. How and why did you get interested in the game of baseball? I suppose I got interested in baseball in the same way that many other people do. The nineteen sixty one season was a fascinating season. And I was eleven years old and discovered baseball cards that spring and just got instantly hooked on them and never quite grew out of it. Did you a play, Yes, but not well enough to talk about I'm a very I'm a very bad athlete. I'm not highly competitive. So it was always your interest in baseball was always from the point of view of a fan. Yes, the score at the end of private Yankees too. He wasn't like most kids. He didn't dream of playing baseball, of having the experience, and he didn't grow out of his childhood obsession. He grew into it. If I'd have grabbed you and said, Bill, please explain to me, like why you're interested in this to the extent you are, what would you have said as to why I was interested in it? It filled a hole in my soul somewhere. I'm not going to push you too hard on this, but the hole in the soul. What was the hole in the soul that this stuff filled. I had a difficult childhood. My father was a small town school janitor. I had no mother. Anyway, it was very, very hard. Bill was the youngest of six children. Their mother died of cancer when Bill was four years old. Right after that, their father had a nasty accident. It left him for a time paralyzed. Baseball. Well, two things got me through it. What is baseball? And the other is that I had a sister a year older than me named Nell, and Nell and I really thought of ourselves as one person. We weren't loners exactly, but we disliked me in together, just the two of us, we did everything together. Bill's sister Nell Ritchie. I remember we didn't have kindergarten in our little town. We went straight into first grade. So when I went into first grade, I took him with me. I remember just dragging him along to school with me, and he said on my desk and he left it. At any point, did it occur to you that he had an unusual view of the world around him. Yes, you know, in the evenings we didn't have television, so in the evenings we had to amuse ourselves. And the way he amused himselfless. He just had a big chief tablet and three two boxes full of baseball cards, and he would des rite columns of a player's name and then all these numbers out to the side, and another name, and all these numbers out to the side. And he did it night after night after night. He'd have pages and pages of columns of numbers and names. It was never just about numbers for Bill James. He was a search for meaning. The James family didn't have a religion, but now went out and got one. And so in a way did Bill. I don't know. You find one day, just the one day, and the one thing for me is is Jesus, and the one thing for Bill is baseball. You get the idea to a young, effectively orphaned Bill James, Baseball was never just baseball. When I was eleven, I was massively confused about the nature of the universe and why it hated me, and it became very important to me to create an order to the universe. Baseball was the starting point. It was It was the steak in the ground that I used to try to make what sense I could out of an overwhelmingly complicated universe. Why is it such a particularly good place to do the kind of thinking you did? Baseball is very very orderly. In baseball, the players take turns, they stop at marked off points, point one or point two point three, or they come home. There are a number of outs. It's an extremely orderly universe gaming the ball and just pushing a toy to play with that bad arm throw the first not in time, Johnny Law staving back, life could feel senseless, but baseball could be fully understood and seemed to be understood. To hear the insiders talk, you think the big things worth knowing were already known. Year before last the nineteen sixty three Sleeves and Washburn won five in a roll at the start of the year. At what point in your life do you first recall having thoughts about the game that might be different from the thoughts that are coming out of the mouths of announcers and sports writers and the kind of people who talk publicly about the game. In nineteen sixty six, there was an article in the Sporting News saying that the Dodgers were thinking about whether they could keep West Parker and the lineup. I don't know who West Parker is either, but that's okay. West Parker isn't the point here. The point is the young Bill James and the way he mulled over what everyone else was saying. West Parker was a very fine defense first basement, but he didn't hit, and they were thinking about whether they could afford to keep him in the lineup, although they said he probably saved the Dodgers a hit per game with his glove. It struck him that the value of taking a hit away from the other team was the same as getting a hit for your team. If West Parker, in every game took a hit away from the other team, then West Parker was in effect a four seventy hitter. That would make him the best hitter who ever lived. And if West Parker was the best hitter who ever lived, you'd better keep him in the lineup, no matter how bad he was it everything else. I wrote a twelve to fifteen page letter and sent it to the Sporting News, which you can imagine what their reaction to that was. Anyway, let us say they did not publish it. So by nineteen sixty six I was quite certainly having chains of thought about the game that were different than what I was being told. You you were already thinking this is worth arguing about. Yes. Bill was only sixteen at the time. His sister Nell soon left home and got married. Bill went to college at the University of Kansas. He took classes in economics, but only because he saw that he could apply economics to baseball. From a distance, his life seemed almost normal. Only his sister was close enough to see that. It wasn't if I'd asked you as he gets a bit older, like, what do you think is going to happen to your brother when he grows up? What do you think you might have said? What's he going to be? They went to college, he got his degrees, and then he didn't do anything with him. And I remember that, you know, I was thrown obviously by then, and I was just puzzled in the head because he you know, he spent all that time and energy and money getting these degrees and he's working as a night watchman in a working bean factory. What is a heads going on? Bill James guarded pork and beans, and not just any pork and beans, Stokely Van Camp's pork and beans. They've been a part of the family for over a century. I used to eat those beans when I was a little kid, So it's possible Bill James was guarding my beans. One of them. Are those great simple pleasures? Anyway, guarding these beans gave him time and space to do what he really wanted to do, think even more about baseball. I was not a self confident person. I was not a polite person, to be blunt, and I was not the kind of person who could put on a suit and go do a job interview and get a good job. I just wasn't made that way. You know. One of the things that kind of was just there in our lives was that you just accept people the way they are, and that was the way he was. So as long as they don't get in any trouble and they don't borrow money from you, you're you know, and just leave him alone. And so we just colleged him alone. The pork and beans must have guarded themselves, because inside Stokely Van Camp's factory, Bill James got busy cutting and pasting baseball statistics gleaned from newspapers. Doing with computers and spreadsheets in the cloud would one day make far easier, but doing it, of course without those tools, Searching for patterns in the numbers, digging for a better understanding of his small, orderly universe so he could write a book. There was a community of people here who played this local product called ballpark baseball. But that community of people who were very much like me. That community people was maybe seventy five or one hundred people. Right, Well, if there are seventy five or one hundred people in Laura's Kansas who have that interest, how aboudy are there in the country. It was a very Bill James thing to do. Look to data to measure his potential audience. Do the math, you know, you come up with an answer that's around what, yeah, two three millions something I don't know, and I suppose, well, probably it isn't that large, but it's got to be large enough. He never imagined a real publisher would publish his book because there was nothing like his book, and so he need to make a photocopy for each and every reader. He was twenty seven years old when he finished it. Nineteen seventy seven Baseball Abstract, not even the nineteen seventy seven baseball abstract, just nineteen seventy seven baseball Abstract. You opened the first page of the nineteen seventy seven abstract, which I have in my hands right now, and it's just it's like it's month by month batting statistics of every of all Major leaguers who appeared in one hundred and more games in nineteen seventy six, And it goes on to thirty pages. It's it's just bought, it's just stats, right. But in my mind, when I started writing the book, it was most something much greater than that. But when I started writing, I had no idea how difficult was to write a book. When you're thinking someone's going to pick up this book and be interested in it, what makes you think that the first thirty pages, the numbers in these first thirty pages are going to get it going. The fact that I was slow to find my voice and my confidence is critical to my having been successful, because I felt strongly that no one is going to listen to me. I always felt like in order for anyone to pay attention to me, I had to have a specific fact that I could point to. So you led with these facts, which don't make for the most thrilling reading unless you're really interested in those facts and they're your anchor. They, I mean, they keep you honest. Yes, it took Bill James thirty one pages of his first book before he finally used some words, but once he did, you could see him planting the seeds of a revolution that would grow and upend all of baseball. Bill James baseball abstract was not just about baseball. He was talking about the way human beings valued other human beings. He thought the experts of baseball were using the wrong statistics to judge the players errors. For example, the statistic assigned to players who made obvious mistakes on defense? What is an error? That's Bill reading what he wrote. It is, without exception, the only major statistic in sports, which is a record of what an observer thinks should have been accomplished. Some moral judgment, really in the peculiar, a quasi morality of the locker room. That judgment was made by the official scorekeeper, high up in some booth. That alone filled Bill James with a righteous indignation. One has a play on a baseball field whenever one has the anticipation, reflexes, and the speed to get to where the play is. If one does not have the in short talent to get to the play, then one doesn't have a play and can't be charged with an error. The official score doesn't charge anybody with a lack of talent. You have to do something right to get an error, even if the ball is hit right to you and you were standing in the right place to begin with. There was a lot more of this sort of thing in Bill's first book, a lot of its seemingly obvious yet original and startling. But to let people know of his book's existence, Bill could afford only a small ad in the Sporting News. The ad even promised readers that they could have their money back if they didn't like it. I mean by a second edition of the book sold three hundred copies, and I was like, wow, three hundred copies. I had very low expectations that I was surprised that there were so many people who were interested in this. And at what point do you realize that, like, the key to having to thinking about baseball in a new and interesting way is going to involve a more sophisticated use of statistics than most sports writers and broadcasters and so on use them. What I realized was that a lot of what people said to be true about baseball was mathematically impossible. And by the way, this is still true today that people in broadcasting baseball games will routinely make statements which are mathematically impossible. I always saw those again, not by discipline or work, but just instinctively. Every year, for the next five years, Bill wrote his baseball abstract and took orders for it. He and his wife Susie, photocopy it and mail it out, and his audience grew. A movement of like minded souls gathered around him. He gave the movement a name, saber Metrics. Saber was an acronym for the Society for American Baseball Research. Metrics was well metrics. Fans of saber Metrics all had one thing in common. They were baseball outsiders. Baseball insiders. The players and managers took zero interest in what Bill James had to say. On the other hand, baseball fans applied what they learned from Bill to build teams in their fantasy leagues, and they were killing it. Then one day Bill James got a phone call from the agent of a major league player entering arbitration. Arbitration is a bizarre process in baseball. The player and the team appear before a panel of three judges to argue about his next year's salary. You get into him arbitration case. What's the arbitrator want to know? This side says his player is really good, and the side says he's not so good. The side says he's comparable to the set of players, But what are the facts here? The player in this case, a pitcher, needed an expert to help him counteract his team's argument that he was worse than he claimed. His one loss record was nine and sixteen, but his offense's support had been very poor. In other words, my pitcher only seems to suck because your team sucks, And we introduced an exhibit showing that his offense suport had been normal. Is one loss record probably been about fourteen and eleven. It wasn't necessarily the pitcher's fault that his team had lost, anymore than it was necessarily a mother's fault that her kids had turned out badly. To evaluate any pitcher or any mom, you had to think some more about it. Bill James. Next exhibit in the pitcher's defense made the argument that his one loss record was simply a byproduct of the number of runs his team scored while he was pitching and the number of runs they allowed. It's basic now, right, something everybody knows. But at the time there's like, oh, so that they had no response to that at all. So it's kind of great. It's kind of great that their ignorance is actually honest. That there is they actually they aren't thinking the other side the end, the people who are running the baseball team actually aren't thinking. That's right, they weren't. But why were Why weren't they thinking? Michael? They weren't thinking because they thought they knew. And that's that's what destroys me and all of us keeps this from doing the things we could do. Is they thinking that we know things that we don't actually know. This total outsider who was just trying to understand some little corner of the universe was creating smarter ways to value athletes just as athletes were becoming seriously valuable, just as baseball salaries were going from tens of thousands of dollars to millions of dollars. The insiders still ignored Bill James, but the outsiders loved it, and in nineteen eighty two, a real publisher offered him a book contract. Baseball is drowning in records, and people think about them and talk about them and write about them a great deal. Why doesn't anybody use them? I really don't know, but that, in essence is what I am about. Here Bill was now publishing without a photocopy or staples. His audience grew from thousands to hundreds of thousands, all baseball outsiders. He saw no sign that anyone inside a major league front office was listening to what he was saying until these guys came along. Why have all this by dood, Bill odious, by what he's Andretten start the celebration. The athleticscept on my worst, the Oakland a people inside their front office had been reading Bill James without telling anyone. They didn't have as much money as the other teams, yet they won more games. I went to see the team to try to figure out how they did it. The answer was simply that they were taking Bill James's thinking out onto the field. The book I wrote about the Moneyball wasn't just about baseball. It was about expertise. How this new knowledge enabled you to run circles around the rest of baseball. He gets on base alone, Rocco, Do I care if it's a walk or hit? Pete? I do not. My book popularized what Bill James had led the Oakland A's to do. Then Brad Pitt popularized the book by making a movie out of it. In that version, Bill James wound up on the cutting room floor. In the movie, he shows up in just a single photo and a few lines. People are overlooked for a variety of biased reasons and perceived flaws age, years, personality, Bill James and Mathmax cut straight through that it wasn't that Bill James was completely unknown. I mean a lot of people knew who he was even before the movie came out. He'd had a cameo on The Simpsons. I made baseball as much fun as doing your Texans funny not true, opposite of true. But like a lot of people who fire the first shot, Bill was sort of left behind by the revolution. He was eventually hired by the Boston Red Sox, and he became woven into the game, and Moneyball became a shorthand for a new way of doing things in every corner of American life. It's being called moneyball for the restaurant industry. Will show you how big data analytics is transforming the way you experienced fine dining. Florida Senator Marco Rubio announced his campaign yesterday, and fundraisers are already calling him the Moneyball candidate. Tracking serial killers using math and statistics. It's kind of like Moneyball from there we got after you wrote Moneyball, then there was a Bill James of everything there was. I mean, there was somebody trying to apply my ways of thinking to every subject on earth. Did you find some of that interesting or did you think that it was a false analogy, that there really wasn't a way to do what you did with baseball, well, lots of other things. A lot of it seemed interesting, but I was always frustrated that I couldn't help with it. A lot of people would ask me to help with serious problems about things, and I know people people would ask what I thought about some cancer research they were doing, literally, and it's very you know, my parents die of cancer. I wish I could help here, but I don't know what the hell you're talking about. People wanted you to be an all purpose expert. Yes, they figure you crack baseball, you can crack cancer, well right, but he I didn't even crack baseball, at least to his way of thinking. Even an orderly universe alluded perfect understanding. For some reason, people couldn't accept that Bill's growing band of followers wanted to believe that he'd settled more questions than he actually had. I almost want to read you some of it, but I assume you kind of remember it. I sort of have to remember it. You sort of have to remember it. But I'm gonna read a paragraph just to get you back in the spirit. Okay, that's me thumbing through nineteen eighty eight Baseball Abstract. The Bill James of nineteen eighty eight is at his peak. He's got a publisher and sells lots of books. He's become a kind of guru, and he's about to tell his readers to piss off. He's done writing for them. And I only read one little passage because it's pretty great. But whereas I used to write one year jackass letter a year, I now write maybe thirty. I hate to say it, and I hope you're not one of them. But I am encountering more and more of my own readers that I don't even like, nitwits, who gloam onto something superficial in the book and misunderstand its underlying message. And I don't remember writing that at all, but I haven't read it since I wrote it, Breaking the wand he called this long forgotten essay in it, Bill James announced that he was retiring from magic. He hadn't lost his interest in baseball. He lost his interest in the revolution. And I don't want to steer the witness, but the thing that I'm just interested in the way you might have felt misused, misunderstood, like this thing that you started had metastasized into something that you didn't quite like. Yes, that was true at the time, and it still is. A lot of modern sabord metrics is stuff that I don't like and wish people would stop doing. Stop saying that's quite true. What kind of saber metrics do you wish people would stop doing? Okay, actually, I'll spare you the details of the saber metrics. The gist of Bill's complaint about his own followers was that they were using numbers to persuade themselves and others that they knew more than they actually knew, especially when it came to valuing human beings. Very early in his career, he himself had hinted at the problem the baseball abstract. For three years has reverentially avoided rating people. It has been almost a point of honor for a rating is a form of an opinion. If it has growned out of a formula, it becomes an opinion expressed in numbers. Bill himself had planted the seeds for an idea of summing up a player's value in a single number, but while he had serious reservations about it, his followers did not. They ran with it, creating a stat called war or wins above replacement values. You and Bill James, she could break down your little numbers. Take I'll take Bill James. Hey, let me give you something dog. All right, objective methodology wins above replacement. But never mind what that means. Forget about baseball instead, think of all those numbers that substitute for understanding all sorts of things, wines, universities, podcasts. We now quantify and then move on as if there's nothing more to say, when there's often a lot more to say. Baseball has war, Wall Street has VAR. VAR or value at risk, was a single number dreamed up by financial quants in the late nineteen eighties so that a Wall Street CEO could supposedly see how much money his traders might make or lose in a single day. CEOs began to trust VAR over the advice of their own traders. After all, VAR was a number that claimed ninety nine percent accuracy, a low VAR number met you were doing fine. Var numbers were low for Wall Street firms right up to two thousand and eight, and then the risks that the traders took blew up the global financial system. The problems nothing numbers, obviously, it's how people use them. The numbers start out as tools for thinking, they wind up replacing thought. What I was always trying to do is open up the discussion to more ways of looking at the problem, and war or any other absolute measure has the opposite effect. It's not opening up the discussion. It's saying, Okay, we're done. We're done. Bill watched as his followers found what they supposed were the final answers to some question, rather than the start of a new question, as they forgot all over again how hard it is to really know anything, even in a small, orderly universe like baseball. When I came to see you in Lawrence, when I was working on Moneyball, you had that picture on your wall of a baseball field, and you said, that's a field of ignorance. We think we know so much, but actually what we know is about the size of the infield. Do you still feel that way. Do you feel like most of what there is to know about what goes on in a baseball field and the people who play the game is sort of known? I feel that way more than now that I did. That baseball had been a small part of the world in which Bill James might seek understanding. It was that for him when he was eleven years old. It was still that for him after seventy. Every human being on earth is trying to figure out how the world works all the time, and that the moment you're born, you're pitched into this search for understanding of the world, and that effort to understand the world dominates your life every day. It's more pervasive than the need for food, because once you eat, you don't care about that. It's more pervasive than the desire for sex. It's there all the time. You're always trying to figure out the world. But the world is vastly more complicated than the human mind, so you can never do it. So in that environment where everybody is trying all the time to figure out the world, but you can't do it, what happens people latch on to explanations for things that seem to work. Bill James created a movement. That movement has replaced one expert with another. But the point of the movement wasn't simply to replace the expert. The point was to change the spirit in which the expert operates, to unsettle their explanations. Whenever I've asked what's going to happen? I always want to answer, although sometimes I now remember not to, I always want to answer. How can you possibly be stupid enough to ask that question? I don't know what's going to happen? Idea It's just not the nature of the world, but is the nature of people that most of them will answer the question even if they don't know the answer. Yes, A boy wanders into a small and seemingly orderly universe, a universe that can be understood, a universe in which no one's mother has to die, a universe in which the experts seem to know everything there is to know. The young man teaches us that much of what the experts think they know is wrong. That lesson is hard enough to absorb, but there was a bigger one behind it, one that we failed thus far to learn. Against the Rules is written and hosted by me Michael Lewis and produced by Catherine Gerardo and Lydia Jeanecott. Julia Barton is our editor, with additional editing by Audrey Dilling. Beth Johnson is our fact checker, and Mia Lobell executive produces. Our music is created by John Evans and Matthias boss A Stellwagon Symphonette. We record our show at Berkeley Advanced Media Studios, expertly helmed by Tofa Ruth. Thanks also to Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fame, John Snars, Carly Migliori, Christina Sullivan, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Morrano, Royston Deserve, Daniella Lacan, Mary Beth Smith, and Jason Gambrel. Against the Rules is a production of Pushkin Industries. Keep in touch, sign up for Pushkin's newsletter at pushkin dot Fm, or follow at Pushkin Pods. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Don't you think, Michael, Don't you think that young people always vastly underestimated how easy it is to change the world. I think young people will assume that the world is just what it is, and they don't actually realize how easy it is to change many things. It's almost the opposite of what most people would say, because young people seem to be the ones who are agitating to change the world. But I think you might be right. I think so. What you're saying is you underestimated the effect on the world you might have very much. Yes,

Pushkin. I spend a lot of my life walking into complicated situations and trying to figure out who really knows what's going on, who the expert is. It's not always easy to tell. But there was one time when it was easy. This was back in two thousand and two. I just decided to write a book about something truly weird happening in professional baseball. People with a talent for analyzing data were proving that people who ran baseball teams didn't really know what they were doing. What was happening in baseball was the first shot in an expert revolution. We're still living in it. It goes by different names, big data, analytics, moneyball. You may not look like a winning team, but you are one. Back in two thousand and two, it was instantly clear who the expert was. His name was Bill James. He lived in Lawrence, Kansas, and so to Lawrence, Kansas I flew, and I remember two things about that encounter. The first was his manner. How unlike a revolutionary he seemed. He was big, with a beard like a bear, but a slow moving one that only ate plants. He was slow, and deliberate and unassuming. He had every reason to see himself as the world's greatest expert in baseball. But that's not how he saw himself. The other thing I remember was the picture on the wall by his desk, a picture of a baseball diamond. He pointed to it and said, that's a field of ignorance. Bill James could have bassed in what he knew about baseball, but he made a point to remind himself of what he didn't know. I'm Michael Lewis. Welcome back to Against the Rules, where we explore unfairness in American life by looking at what's happened to various characters in American life. This season is all about experts. Our first episodes looked into the ways that people do or do not understand experts. Now we're going to talk about how experts do and do not understand themselves. Our entire society is like baseball was when I wandered in to write a book about it. We have this talent for generating new knowledge, which we proceed to ignore. This was Bill James's experience for much of his life. How and why did you get interested in the game of baseball? I suppose I got interested in baseball in the same way that many other people do. The nineteen sixty one season was a fascinating season. And I was eleven years old and discovered baseball cards that spring and just got instantly hooked on them and never quite grew out of it. Did you a play, Yes, but not well enough to talk about I'm a very I'm a very bad athlete. I'm not highly competitive. So it was always your interest in baseball was always from the point of view of a fan. Yes, the score at the end of private Yankees too. He wasn't like most kids. He didn't dream of playing baseball, of having the experience, and he didn't grow out of his childhood obsession. He grew into it. If I'd have grabbed you and said, Bill, please explain to me, like why you're interested in this to the extent you are, what would you have said as to why I was interested in it? It filled a hole in my soul somewhere. I'm not going to push you too hard on this, but the hole in the soul. What was the hole in the soul that this stuff filled. I had a difficult childhood. My father was a small town school janitor. I had no mother. Anyway, it was very, very hard. Bill was the youngest of six children. Their mother died of cancer when Bill was four years old. Right after that, their father had a nasty accident. It left him for a time paralyzed. Baseball. Well, two things got me through it. What is baseball? And the other is that I had a sister a year older than me named Nell, and Nell and I really thought of ourselves as one person. We weren't loners exactly, but we disliked me in together, just the two of us, we did everything together. Bill's sister Nell Ritchie. I remember we didn't have kindergarten in our little town. We went straight into first grade. So when I went into first grade, I took him with me. I remember just dragging him along to school with me, and he said on my desk and he left it. At any point, did it occur to you that he had an unusual view of the world around him. Yes, you know, in the evenings we didn't have television, so in the evenings we had to amuse ourselves. And the way he amused himselfless. He just had a big chief tablet and three two boxes full of baseball cards, and he would des rite columns of a player's name and then all these numbers out to the side, and another name, and all these numbers out to the side. And he did it night after night after night. He'd have pages and pages of columns of numbers and names. It was never just about numbers for Bill James. He was a search for meaning. The James family didn't have a religion, but now went out and got one. And so in a way did Bill. I don't know. You find one day, just the one day, and the one thing for me is is Jesus, and the one thing for Bill is baseball. You get the idea to a young, effectively orphaned Bill James, Baseball was never just baseball. When I was eleven, I was massively confused about the nature of the universe and why it hated me, and it became very important to me to create an order to the universe. Baseball was the starting point. It was It was the steak in the ground that I used to try to make what sense I could out of an overwhelmingly complicated universe. Why is it such a particularly good place to do the kind of thinking you did? Baseball is very very orderly. In baseball, the players take turns, they stop at marked off points, point one or point two point three, or they come home. There are a number of outs. It's an extremely orderly universe gaming the ball and just pushing a toy to play with that bad arm throw the first not in time, Johnny Law staving back, life could feel senseless, but baseball could be fully understood and seemed to be understood. To hear the insiders talk, you think the big things worth knowing were already known. Year before last the nineteen sixty three Sleeves and Washburn won five in a roll at the start of the year. At what point in your life do you first recall having thoughts about the game that might be different from the thoughts that are coming out of the mouths of announcers and sports writers and the kind of people who talk publicly about the game. In nineteen sixty six, there was an article in the Sporting News saying that the Dodgers were thinking about whether they could keep West Parker and the lineup. I don't know who West Parker is either, but that's okay. West Parker isn't the point here. The point is the young Bill James and the way he mulled over what everyone else was saying. West Parker was a very fine defense first basement, but he didn't hit, and they were thinking about whether they could afford to keep him in the lineup, although they said he probably saved the Dodgers a hit per game with his glove. It struck him that the value of taking a hit away from the other team was the same as getting a hit for your team. If West Parker, in every game took a hit away from the other team, then West Parker was in effect a four seventy hitter. That would make him the best hitter who ever lived. And if West Parker was the best hitter who ever lived, you'd better keep him in the lineup, no matter how bad he was it everything else. I wrote a twelve to fifteen page letter and sent it to the Sporting News, which you can imagine what their reaction to that was. Anyway, let us say they did not publish it. So by nineteen sixty six I was quite certainly having chains of thought about the game that were different than what I was being told. You you were already thinking this is worth arguing about. Yes. Bill was only sixteen at the time. His sister Nell soon left home and got married. Bill went to college at the University of Kansas. He took classes in economics, but only because he saw that he could apply economics to baseball. From a distance, his life seemed almost normal. Only his sister was close enough to see that. It wasn't if I'd asked you as he gets a bit older, like, what do you think is going to happen to your brother when he grows up? What do you think you might have said? What's he going to be? They went to college, he got his degrees, and then he didn't do anything with him. And I remember that, you know, I was thrown obviously by then, and I was just puzzled in the head because he you know, he spent all that time and energy and money getting these degrees and he's working as a night watchman in a working bean factory. What is a heads going on? Bill James guarded pork and beans, and not just any pork and beans, Stokely Van Camp's pork and beans. They've been a part of the family for over a century. I used to eat those beans when I was a little kid, So it's possible Bill James was guarding my beans. One of them. Are those great simple pleasures? Anyway, guarding these beans gave him time and space to do what he really wanted to do, think even more about baseball. I was not a self confident person. I was not a polite person, to be blunt, and I was not the kind of person who could put on a suit and go do a job interview and get a good job. I just wasn't made that way. You know. One of the things that kind of was just there in our lives was that you just accept people the way they are, and that was the way he was. So as long as they don't get in any trouble and they don't borrow money from you, you're you know, and just leave him alone. And so we just colleged him alone. The pork and beans must have guarded themselves, because inside Stokely Van Camp's factory, Bill James got busy cutting and pasting baseball statistics gleaned from newspapers. Doing with computers and spreadsheets in the cloud would one day make far easier, but doing it, of course without those tools, Searching for patterns in the numbers, digging for a better understanding of his small, orderly universe so he could write a book. There was a community of people here who played this local product called ballpark baseball. But that community of people who were very much like me. That community people was maybe seventy five or one hundred people. Right, Well, if there are seventy five or one hundred people in Laura's Kansas who have that interest, how aboudy are there in the country. It was a very Bill James thing to do. Look to data to measure his potential audience. Do the math, you know, you come up with an answer that's around what, yeah, two three millions something I don't know, and I suppose, well, probably it isn't that large, but it's got to be large enough. He never imagined a real publisher would publish his book because there was nothing like his book, and so he need to make a photocopy for each and every reader. He was twenty seven years old when he finished it. Nineteen seventy seven Baseball Abstract, not even the nineteen seventy seven baseball abstract, just nineteen seventy seven baseball Abstract. You opened the first page of the nineteen seventy seven abstract, which I have in my hands right now, and it's just it's like it's month by month batting statistics of every of all Major leaguers who appeared in one hundred and more games in nineteen seventy six, And it goes on to thirty pages. It's it's just bought, it's just stats, right. But in my mind, when I started writing the book, it was most something much greater than that. But when I started writing, I had no idea how difficult was to write a book. When you're thinking someone's going to pick up this book and be interested in it, what makes you think that the first thirty pages, the numbers in these first thirty pages are going to get it going. The fact that I was slow to find my voice and my confidence is critical to my having been successful, because I felt strongly that no one is going to listen to me. I always felt like in order for anyone to pay attention to me, I had to have a specific fact that I could point to. So you led with these facts, which don't make for the most thrilling reading unless you're really interested in those facts and they're your anchor. They, I mean, they keep you honest. Yes, it took Bill James thirty one pages of his first book before he finally used some words, but once he did, you could see him planting the seeds of a revolution that would grow and upend all of baseball. Bill James baseball abstract was not just about baseball. He was talking about the way human beings valued other human beings. He thought the experts of baseball were using the wrong statistics to judge the players errors. For example, the statistic assigned to players who made obvious mistakes on defense? What is an error? That's Bill reading what he wrote. It is, without exception, the only major statistic in sports, which is a record of what an observer thinks should have been accomplished. Some moral judgment, really in the peculiar, a quasi morality of the locker room. That judgment was made by the official scorekeeper, high up in some booth. That alone filled Bill James with a righteous indignation. One has a play on a baseball field whenever one has the anticipation, reflexes, and the speed to get to where the play is. If one does not have the in short talent to get to the play, then one doesn't have a play and can't be charged with an error. The official score doesn't charge anybody with a lack of talent. You have to do something right to get an error, even if the ball is hit right to you and you were standing in the right place to begin with. There was a lot more of this sort of thing in Bill's first book, a lot of its seemingly obvious yet original and startling. But to let people know of his book's existence, Bill could afford only a small ad in the Sporting News. The ad even promised readers that they could have their money back if they didn't like it. I mean by a second edition of the book sold three hundred copies, and I was like, wow, three hundred copies. I had very low expectations that I was surprised that there were so many people who were interested in this. And at what point do you realize that, like, the key to having to thinking about baseball in a new and interesting way is going to involve a more sophisticated use of statistics than most sports writers and broadcasters and so on use them. What I realized was that a lot of what people said to be true about baseball was mathematically impossible. And by the way, this is still true today that people in broadcasting baseball games will routinely make statements which are mathematically impossible. I always saw those again, not by discipline or work, but just instinctively. Every year, for the next five years, Bill wrote his baseball abstract and took orders for it. He and his wife Susie, photocopy it and mail it out, and his audience grew. A movement of like minded souls gathered around him. He gave the movement a name, saber Metrics. Saber was an acronym for the Society for American Baseball Research. Metrics was well metrics. Fans of saber Metrics all had one thing in common. They were baseball outsiders. Baseball insiders. The players and managers took zero interest in what Bill James had to say. On the other hand, baseball fans applied what they learned from Bill to build teams in their fantasy leagues, and they were killing it. Then one day Bill James got a phone call from the agent of a major league player entering arbitration. Arbitration is a bizarre process in baseball. The player and the team appear before a panel of three judges to argue about his next year's salary. You get into him arbitration case. What's the arbitrator want to know? This side says his player is really good, and the side says he's not so good. The side says he's comparable to the set of players, But what are the facts here? The player in this case, a pitcher, needed an expert to help him counteract his team's argument that he was worse than he claimed. His one loss record was nine and sixteen, but his offense's support had been very poor. In other words, my pitcher only seems to suck because your team sucks, And we introduced an exhibit showing that his offense suport had been normal. Is one loss record probably been about fourteen and eleven. It wasn't necessarily the pitcher's fault that his team had lost, anymore than it was necessarily a mother's fault that her kids had turned out badly. To evaluate any pitcher or any mom, you had to think some more about it. Bill James. Next exhibit in the pitcher's defense made the argument that his one loss record was simply a byproduct of the number of runs his team scored while he was pitching and the number of runs they allowed. It's basic now, right, something everybody knows. But at the time there's like, oh, so that they had no response to that at all. So it's kind of great. It's kind of great that their ignorance is actually honest. That there is they actually they aren't thinking the other side the end, the people who are running the baseball team actually aren't thinking. That's right, they weren't. But why were Why weren't they thinking? Michael? They weren't thinking because they thought they knew. And that's that's what destroys me and all of us keeps this from doing the things we could do. Is they thinking that we know things that we don't actually know. This total outsider who was just trying to understand some little corner of the universe was creating smarter ways to value athletes just as athletes were becoming seriously valuable, just as baseball salaries were going from tens of thousands of dollars to millions of dollars. The insiders still ignored Bill James, but the outsiders loved it, and in nineteen eighty two, a real publisher offered him a book contract. Baseball is drowning in records, and people think about them and talk about them and write about them a great deal. Why doesn't anybody use them? I really don't know, but that, in essence is what I am about. Here Bill was now publishing without a photocopy or staples. His audience grew from thousands to hundreds of thousands, all baseball outsiders. He saw no sign that anyone inside a major league front office was listening to what he was saying until these guys came along. Why have all this by dood, Bill odious, by what he's Andretten start the celebration. The athleticscept on my worst, the Oakland a people inside their front office had been reading Bill James without telling anyone. They didn't have as much money as the other teams, yet they won more games. I went to see the team to try to figure out how they did it. The answer was simply that they were taking Bill James's thinking out onto the field. The book I wrote about the Moneyball wasn't just about baseball. It was about expertise. How this new knowledge enabled you to run circles around the rest of baseball. He gets on base alone, Rocco, Do I care if it's a walk or hit? Pete? I do not. My book popularized what Bill James had led the Oakland A's to do. Then Brad Pitt popularized the book by making a movie out of it. In that version, Bill James wound up on the cutting room floor. In the movie, he shows up in just a single photo and a few lines. People are overlooked for a variety of biased reasons and perceived flaws age, years, personality, Bill James and Mathmax cut straight through that it wasn't that Bill James was completely unknown. I mean a lot of people knew who he was even before the movie came out. He'd had a cameo on The Simpsons. I made baseball as much fun as doing your Texans funny not true, opposite of true. But like a lot of people who fire the first shot, Bill was sort of left behind by the revolution. He was eventually hired by the Boston Red Sox, and he became woven into the game, and Moneyball became a shorthand for a new way of doing things in every corner of American life. It's being called moneyball for the restaurant industry. Will show you how big data analytics is transforming the way you experienced fine dining. Florida Senator Marco Rubio announced his campaign yesterday, and fundraisers are already calling him the Moneyball candidate. Tracking serial killers using math and statistics. It's kind of like Moneyball from there we got after you wrote Moneyball, then there was a Bill James of everything there was. I mean, there was somebody trying to apply my ways of thinking to every subject on earth. Did you find some of that interesting or did you think that it was a false analogy, that there really wasn't a way to do what you did with baseball, well, lots of other things. A lot of it seemed interesting, but I was always frustrated that I couldn't help with it. A lot of people would ask me to help with serious problems about things, and I know people people would ask what I thought about some cancer research they were doing, literally, and it's very you know, my parents die of cancer. I wish I could help here, but I don't know what the hell you're talking about. People wanted you to be an all purpose expert. Yes, they figure you crack baseball, you can crack cancer, well right, but he I didn't even crack baseball, at least to his way of thinking. Even an orderly universe alluded perfect understanding. For some reason, people couldn't accept that Bill's growing band of followers wanted to believe that he'd settled more questions than he actually had. I almost want to read you some of it, but I assume you kind of remember it. I sort of have to remember it. You sort of have to remember it. But I'm gonna read a paragraph just to get you back in the spirit. Okay, that's me thumbing through nineteen eighty eight Baseball Abstract. The Bill James of nineteen eighty eight is at his peak. He's got a publisher and sells lots of books. He's become a kind of guru, and he's about to tell his readers to piss off. He's done writing for them. And I only read one little passage because it's pretty great. But whereas I used to write one year jackass letter a year, I now write maybe thirty. I hate to say it, and I hope you're not one of them. But I am encountering more and more of my own readers that I don't even like, nitwits, who gloam onto something superficial in the book and misunderstand its underlying message. And I don't remember writing that at all, but I haven't read it since I wrote it, Breaking the wand he called this long forgotten essay in it, Bill James announced that he was retiring from magic. He hadn't lost his interest in baseball. He lost his interest in the revolution. And I don't want to steer the witness, but the thing that I'm just interested in the way you might have felt misused, misunderstood, like this thing that you started had metastasized into something that you didn't quite like. Yes, that was true at the time, and it still is. A lot of modern sabord metrics is stuff that I don't like and wish people would stop doing. Stop saying that's quite true. What kind of saber metrics do you wish people would stop doing? Okay, actually, I'll spare you the details of the saber metrics. The gist of Bill's complaint about his own followers was that they were using numbers to persuade themselves and others that they knew more than they actually knew, especially when it came to valuing human beings. Very early in his career, he himself had hinted at the problem the baseball abstract. For three years has reverentially avoided rating people. It has been almost a point of honor for a rating is a form of an opinion. If it has growned out of a formula, it becomes an opinion expressed in numbers. Bill himself had planted the seeds for an idea of summing up a player's value in a single number, but while he had serious reservations about it, his followers did not. They ran with it, creating a stat called war or wins above replacement values. You and Bill James, she could break down your little numbers. Take I'll take Bill James. Hey, let me give you something dog. All right, objective methodology wins above replacement. But never mind what that means. Forget about baseball instead, think of all those numbers that substitute for understanding all sorts of things, wines, universities, podcasts. We now quantify and then move on as if there's nothing more to say, when there's often a lot more to say. Baseball has war, Wall Street has VAR. VAR or value at risk, was a single number dreamed up by financial quants in the late nineteen eighties so that a Wall Street CEO could supposedly see how much money his traders might make or lose in a single day. CEOs began to trust VAR over the advice of their own traders. After all, VAR was a number that claimed ninety nine percent accuracy, a low VAR number met you were doing fine. Var numbers were low for Wall Street firms right up to two thousand and eight, and then the risks that the traders took blew up the global financial system. The problems nothing numbers, obviously, it's how people use them. The numbers start out as tools for thinking, they wind up replacing thought. What I was always trying to do is open up the discussion to more ways of looking at the problem, and war or any other absolute measure has the opposite effect. It's not opening up the discussion. It's saying, Okay, we're done. We're done. Bill watched as his followers found what they supposed were the final answers to some question, rather than the start of a new question, as they forgot all over again how hard it is to really know anything, even in a small, orderly universe like baseball. When I came to see you in Lawrence, when I was working on Moneyball, you had that picture on your wall of a baseball field, and you said, that's a field of ignorance. We think we know so much, but actually what we know is about the size of the infield. Do you still feel that way. Do you feel like most of what there is to know about what goes on in a baseball field and the people who play the game is sort of known? I feel that way more than now that I did. That baseball had been a small part of the world in which Bill James might seek understanding. It was that for him when he was eleven years old. It was still that for him after seventy. Every human being on earth is trying to figure out how the world works all the time, and that the moment you're born, you're pitched into this search for understanding of the world, and that effort to understand the world dominates your life every day. It's more pervasive than the need for food, because once you eat, you don't care about that. It's more pervasive than the desire for sex. It's there all the time. You're always trying to figure out the world. But the world is vastly more complicated than the human mind, so you can never do it. So in that environment where everybody is trying all the time to figure out the world, but you can't do it, what happens people latch on to explanations for things that seem to work. Bill James created a movement. That movement has replaced one expert with another. But the point of the movement wasn't simply to replace the expert. The point was to change the spirit in which the expert operates, to unsettle their explanations. Whenever I've asked what's going to happen? I always want to answer, although sometimes I now remember not to, I always want to answer. How can you possibly be stupid enough to ask that question? I don't know what's going to happen? Idea It's just not the nature of the world, but is the nature of people that most of them will answer the question even if they don't know the answer. Yes, A boy wanders into a small and seemingly orderly universe, a universe that can be understood, a universe in which no one's mother has to die, a universe in which the experts seem to know everything there is to know. The young man teaches us that much of what the experts think they know is wrong. That lesson is hard enough to absorb, but there was a bigger one behind it, one that we failed thus far to learn. Against the Rules is written and hosted by me Michael Lewis and produced by Catherine Gerardo and Lydia Jeanecott. Julia Barton is our editor, with additional editing by Audrey Dilling. Beth Johnson is our fact checker, and Mia Lobell executive produces. Our music is created by John Evans and Matthias boss A Stellwagon Symphonette. We record our show at Berkeley Advanced Media Studios, expertly helmed by Tofa Ruth. Thanks also to Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fame, John Snars, Carly Migliori, Christina Sullivan, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Morrano, Royston Deserve, Daniella Lacan, Mary Beth Smith, and Jason Gambrel. Against the Rules is a production of Pushkin Industries. Keep in touch, sign up for Pushkin's newsletter at pushkin dot Fm, or follow at Pushkin Pods. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Don't you think, Michael, Don't you think that young people always vastly underestimated how easy it is to change the world. I think young people will assume that the world is just what it is, and they don't actually realize how easy it is to change many things. It's almost the opposite of what most people would say, because young people seem to be the ones who are agitating to change the world. But I think you might be right. I think so. What you're saying is you underestimated the effect on the world you might have very much. Yes,