''The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract'' is a reference book written by

Bill James George William James (born October 5, 1949) is an American baseball writer, historian, and statistician whose work has been widely influential. Since 1977, James has written more than two dozen books devoted to baseball history and statistics. ...

featuring an overview of professional

baseball Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each, taking turns batting and fielding. The game occurs over the course of several plays, with each play generally beginning when a player on the fielding t ...

decade by decade, along with rankings of the top 100 players at each position. The original edition was published in 1985 by

Villard Books Villard, also known as Villard Books, is a publishing imprint of Random House, one of the largest publishing companies in the world, owned by Bertelsmann since 1998 and grouped in Penguin Random House since 2013. It was founded in 1983. Villard be ...

,''The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract'' Villard 1985 updated in paperback in 1988, then followed by ''The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract'' in 2001. In the 2001 edition, James introduced his win shares system, an attempt to quantify a player's overall contributions to his team, which he used as part of his player ranking system. A revised edition was published in paperback in 2003.

References

Books by Bill James 1985 non-fiction books Baseball books Villard (imprint) books {{Sport-book-stub

See also

References