Bill James Does Not Make Projections in the Bill James Handbook

The name Bill James should be familiar to all baseball fans who read Moneyball and to fans who follow the Red Sox. As a pioneer of several new-era statistics, James used to publish his Baseball Abstract from ’77-’88 on a yearly basis. His current annual is called The Bill James Handbook and it recaps the past season as well as projects the upcoming season. While I doubted James’ ability to project every stat for every single player in baseball each offseason, I still figured the man for whom the book is named actually projected (or ran data that projected) the stats for most players. I also figured that James’ writing responsibilities might be limited by his job with the Red Sox but I was still pretty shocked to read this in an interview Theo Epstein gave a few weeks ago. Here’s the Q&A:

According to Bill James, Adrian Beltre is going to have 17 home runs, 68 RBIs. Is that a satisfactory season?

That probably wouldn’t be, but you are probably reading from the Bill James Handbook, which he doesn’t have anything to do with. They just slap his name on it.

Really?

Those projections are not his actual projections. He likes to read them to see what they are when they come out. We actually have — Bill is involved and [we] have others on staff who do more detailed projections that mean something but don’t mean everything to us.

There you go — according to Epstein, Bill James doesn’t even make projections in his own damn handbook! He saves the good stuff for the Red Sox and leaves his staff to appease the public. That makes sense because the Red Sox would be losing their edge if James shared his work with his competition but the whole thing does seem a little backwards to me. Thanks to LBS contributor Alan for passing along the insightful Epstein interview. By the way, I have a better projection for the Bill James crew: what are the odds Adrian Beltre wears a cup this season?