Bill James knows a lot about baseball. Nobody is going to argue that his nugget-filled abstracts are a fun read for stat geeks. We have only spoken to him once, for an interview several years ago, but we enjoyed it. That said, Bugs & Cranks unearths a passage from The Bill James Gold Mine 2008 that is, frankly, rather controversial and out of character. We have not read the book, but we’ll trust the account. From B&C, quoting the book:

“Two of the greatest home run under-producers of all time were teammates: Kirby Puckett and Gary Gaetti in 1984. Puckett hit no home runs (-16), Gaetti hit only 5 (-19). Suggesting the possibility that the Twins’ two World Championships may have been aided by their team being among the first to discover … well, I’d better not go there. Nor will I point out that Gaetti was bald and had acne and Puckett died young.”

That seems like pretty circumstantial “evidence,” and we do use that term lightly, to throw that kind of line into print. And again, it raises our chief red flag about statistics, sabermetrics and the like: sometimes there are dots to be connected and conclusions to be drawn based just on numbers; and sometimes, there’s a whole different range of mitigating factors for which numbers on a page can’t account. Is Puckett’s home run pattern worth a discussion that most people would rather not have? Perhaps. But not like that.

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