The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract

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The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract is a reference-type book written by Bill James featuring an overview of baseball decade by decade, along with rankings of the top 100 players at each position. The original edition was published in 1985, followed by the The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract (ISBN 0-684-80697-5) in 2001. In the 2001 edition, James introduced his Win Shares system, an attempt to quantify a player's overall contributions to his team, which he used as part of his player ranking system.