A baseball encyclopedia entry tells a story. From time to time I will put together a series on individual players where I use their statistics to glean something interesting about them. Bill James takes this to the next level, and invents players and statistics to tell a fictional story:
I was trying to explain this concept to a friend a few months ago, and what my friend thought that I was saying was that charts of numbers can be created on which fiction can be based; in other words, that one could take each chart of numbers and imagine, based on that, the life and career that the player could have had. But that’s not exactly it. What I am actually arguing is that the story is created—the FICTION is created—by the numbers themselves. While of course that story can be enhanced and developed by words, just as a story told in words can be enhanced and developed into a movie or a TV show or a comic book. …while of course that story could be enhanced and developed by words, the chart of numbers ITSELF represents the fixed posts of the story which give it its inherent shape, and much of its original detail.
Bill also provides a sample of these fictional players. Enjoy!
from baseballmusings.com http://ift.tt/1SgBGIa
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