I want it, too.
Bill James did more to enhance my understanding of baseball than any human being. His abstracts, while in retrospect obviously tentative first steps toward an analytic understanding of the game, were amazing to me, and I read them with great anticipation. James was the first to suggest that you didn't need to be a grizzled old scout with wrinkled skin and 40 years in the game in order to understand how baseball games were won or lost. The things I learned first from him are still foundational to me: that getting on base, not making outs, is the key to offensive performance; that understanding the parks in which the game is played is crucial to team formation; that ball players peak between 25-27, and not at 31 or 32 as Curt Gowdy and Tony Kubek were always trying to tell me; that there were such things as "peripherals" like strikeouts and walks per nine that told you much more about pitching performance than the won-loss record; that OBP and Slugging percentage were really crucial, much more so than the vaunted batting average, and on and on and on.
I had no one else to teach me this. There was no SOSH in 1984, but there was the Bill James abstract. The foundations to today's player evaluation, it seems to me, flow directly from the work of Bill James.
And the writing! What a talented writer he was! It always amuses me when a hack like the CHB mocks Bill James. No only does Bill James know more about baseball than CHB will ever know, he was a far better writer than CHB can ever aspire to be.
It won't happen. The HOF won't recognize Marvin Miller, what chance is there for Bill James? But every team in MLB makes decisions today in ways that are either based upon or protests against Bill James. And if that's not a Hall of Famer, then, as he once said of, I think, Dick Allen, then I'm a lug nut.