Baseball Obscura 2025 update

Jonathan Falk pointed us to this book by David Fleming, Baseball Obscura, that’s . . . ummm, I’m not quite sure how to describe it. To call it a book in the style of the 1980s Bill James Baseball abstracts isn’t quite right. It’s more of a replica. Not a parody (you’d have to credit Veronica Geng for the best Bill James parody that anyone will ever write, with the bonus that it illustrates James’s influence at that time that an author such as Geng would’ve thought his style worth parodying), more like the exact thing that Bill James would write today, if he’d been frozen in suspended animation in 1985 or so and woken up last year.

It’s hard for me to come up with another example in literature–fiction or nonfiction–of this sort of imitation of style, setting aside examples where a replacement author is explicitly continuing some franchise series. Or, I guess, long-running TV shows where the original creative team is replaced by new writers who can, to a greater or lesser extent, continue producing more of the same, at least for a few years.

Another analogy is in music, where artists such as Madeleine Peyroux or Yola are deliberately writing and singing songs in throwback styles, so much so that even their originals can sound like covers.

Fleming’s book is just fine. When reading it, I had the same feeling as Falk did, that it was interesting and enjoyable but didn’t elicit the feeling of excitement that I got from Bill James’s Abstracts when they were released each spring. As Falk and I discussed, I think the reason for the lack of excitement is the lack of novelty. Even the Bill James Abstracts were more exciting in 1984 and 1985 than in 1987 and 1988. He had new things to say each time, but we were getting used to the format.

The other thing is that this sort of work is no longer cutting-edge baseball analytics. Back in the 1980s, Bill James was the cutting edge. Fleming’s 2025 book is pretty much all stuff that James could’ve written 40 years ago–or, for that matter, what James might write now, if he felt like going back to the Baseball Abstract grind. More sophisticated stuff is being done elsewhere. Maybe not so readable, but yielding more new baseball insights.

That all said, I enjoyed Fleming’s book. It has the same pleasant mix of storytelling, baseball details, analytics, and general philosophizing that you’ll find with Bill James, and almost an identical writing style–again, not a bad thing, as James is an excellent writer.

One thing that did surprise me, and that’s the lack of any blurb from Bill James. Fleming used to write for James’s website, and he thanks James more than once in his book. And his book seems like something James would love. So why no endorsement? Maybe James has a policy of never doing blurbs? Or is there more to the story?