I was going to write about The Bill James Baseball Gold Mine for this column, but I have not had much time to read it. I can tell you that Bill James is a funny guy and his Gold Mine contains very interesting things that one cannot find elsewhere. This got me thinking about Bill James and his place in the baseball universe.

I’ve never read a Baseball Abstract. I’ve never even seen one. For me, the sabermetrics movement started with Moneyball. Yet I’ve read great reviews of James’s writing, how he’d asked questions no one had asked before, how he visualized baseball in an entirely new way, and how he sparked the movement to record and database every event in every baseball game. Stars of the sabermetrics field from Rich Lederer to Rob Neyer name Bill James as a primary influence.

But in the most advanced of sabermetrics circles these days Bill James is regarded as outdated and irrelevant. Tom Tango, co-author of The Book, has reservations about The Godfather of Sabermetrics. In a February post to The Book’s blog, he wrote, “I know why what I’m saying is a candidate for the future of sabermetrics. I don’t know why what he says is.” Mike Fast, a commenter who writes for Statistically Speaking, a sabermetrics blog, said, “Bill James is one of my heroes, but it’s sad to read his stuff these days.”

Such is the view of James in an increasingly dense universe of sabermetric research, where it is easy to know a little but increasingly difficult to be on the cutting edge. There are no graduate programs in sabermetrics, as far as I know, but if there were they would teach what is already available and free on the Internet. But Bill James, in a recent interview with The Hardball Times, admitted that he doesn’t follow current work in sabermetrics. Yet, he has launched his own site, Bill James Online, which purports to have information “that the reader doesn’t have any way of finding out.” Well, how does he know? We have Retrosheet, too.

MGL, aka Mitchel Lichtman, recently reviewed the Gold Mine on The Book’s blog. Like me, he just skimmed it. “So far, ‘eh,’” he writes. Generally, MGL intimates that he and his people could do a much better job with these questions than James. I don’t disagree with him.

But James, a better writer than a math geek, is the visionary, not Tango or Lichtman. The Book was stock full of gems, but terribly written, while Gold Mine may be methodologically suspect but very coherent. Ordinary people don’t want to calculate WAR, but if they can enhance their understanding and have fun doing it, they’ll go for it. I can understand regressions and sample sizes and the value of wOBA, so I could churn through The Book, but just barely. Of course, groundbreaking research shouldn’t have to maintain a riveting narrative, but there’s a reason no one reads James Maxwell’s unedited manuscripts on electricity and magnetism: they’re full of complex equations with unclear exposition. Besides, Michael Faraday thought it all up in the first place.

Dave Studeman reviewed Gold Mine for The Hardball Times. He has more fun with it than Lichtman, but has his own complaints, namely a lack of context and definitions in the book, and for the most part, on the accompanying web site. “James has stated that he wrote the book for the 90% of his readers who don’t need or want the detail.” Basically, it’s a fun book that will tell you things like, “Lastings Milledge was thrown 50 inside pitches and chased only one of them. He was thrown 132 outside pitches and chased more than half of them.” Clearly, James should write the blurbs on the back of baseball cards.

By the way, in that aforementioned interview James named The Office as one of his favorite television shows. (He also included 60 Minutes—I can imagine him appreciating Andy Rooney). I’ve only seen The Office: American style a few times, ignoring it for the most part because I wish to maintain that BBC’s version is better and this stateside bastardization is an example of everything that is wrong with American comedy. This Schrute character has nothing on Garreth Keenan. “Dawn” is not supposed to be that attractive. And “Jim”? Not pathetic enough. The American pathos is clearly not subtle enough to handle true post-modern absurdity. It’s a shame, too, because if anyone could handle that charge, it would be Michael Schur, writer and editor of The Office and snarky blogger of Fire Joe Morgan fame.

Schur recently “sat down” for an interview with Sam Mellinger of the Kansas City Star. On FJM, Schur is Ken Tremendous, who along with his less prolific co-bloggers takes the worst of baseball sports writing to task with scorn and sarcasm at full-blast. They are so funny that despite an extremely simple format and an overly unprofessional manner, they have become big shots of the sports blogging world and favorites of sabermetrics geeks everywhere. Yet they are not sabermetricians, nor do they claim any expertise on the subject at all. As Schur told the Star:

Sometimes I find sites where our blog is being discussed, and hard-core stat people are like incensed that anyone would read us or take us seriously. They point out that we, for example, use WARP3 to evaluate players, and argue that WARP is terrible because WARP uses FRAA, which is a bad fielding metric, and that it equates FRAA with VORP, and we should really use UZR or something, and also: how can we call ourselves sabermetricians when we haven’t even read the latest Voros McCracken piece refuting Bill James’s refutation of Pete Palmer’s comment about Super Linear Weights?!

Of course, those “hard-core stat people” are off the mark. There’s a reason why the writers of FJM, and not the stat geeks, are doing the quality comedy. That’s because honest people who are generally but not professionally interested in something can see the big picture. They can ascertain what is meaningful and what is not and have a sense of humor about both. These people, not grizzled old baseball men or number-crunching WAR-calculators, will rear the next generation of baseball fans.

I like to think that I fall into that category. I hate time-tested baseball clichés, I am interested in the new statistics, but I am not coming up with any of my own. I just look for what is interesting and relevant, ask questions about it, and guess about an answer. Hell, I’m just a baseball fan after all. This isn’t serious business. Not for me.

If there’s one guy who epitomizes this new baseball middle ground, it’s Joe Posnanski. Joe also writes for the Star, but it’s his blog that is making waves. Almost every day, Joe graces us with about 4,000 words on whatever he wants. Part of his appeal is that he belongs to the tribe that is regularly mocked by FJM. Another part is that he understands sabermetric concepts like context and replacement and how wins are a stupid statistic. But the really appealing part is that he’s just an ordinary guy who is really funny. In a recent column, he posted an imagined conversation between a “blogger” and the “establishment” in which the blogger tries to introduce batting average into a baseball universe that had previously known only on-base percentage. It’s really quality stuff, even if it takes forever to read.

So what do Posnanski, James and Schur have in common? They’re all heroes of the statistical analysis movement in baseball, yet none of them are really sabermetricians. James asks great questions and gives interesting answers, but the hardcore geeks find his work flawed and limited. Schur writes snarky articles in which he criticizes sports writers’ reliance on terrible statistics like wins and RBI, but he gets his own criticism for using FRAA and OPS. Posnanski, too, has not been immune to criticism. After all, he’s a sports writer himself and he just dabbles in this stuff.

In the current Internet-driven world of baseball fandom, statistical accounts and economic analysis are cheap. But good, humorous baseball writing is worth a lot more to the future of baseball and the makeup of its fans. That’s what the critics on either side—both the newspaper hacks and the spreadsheet geeks—don’t understand. For every complex regression proving that running when down by more than one run in the last three innings is suboptimal, some uninspired beat writer pens another article about the “intangible value” of David Eckstein or Juan Pierre. That’s why we should cherish those who can bridge the gap, guys like Bill James, Ken Tremendous and Joe Posnanski. Sometimes being interesting is better than being right.