The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract

This giant item was the holy book of my adolescence, which says a lot about both my adolescence and this book. James has a (justifiable) reputation as the oddball Kansas stathead who transformed and/or destroyed baseball (see Moneyball), but his secret weapon has always been his writing, which joins a contrarian sharpness worthy of Malcolm Gladwell to an Ian Frazier-level eye for weird detail. The numbers in this book (which was "new" 15 years ago) have long been bypassed, but the meat of it—an idiosyncratic decade-by-decade tour through the game and its players—remains as deliciously browsable as ever.