On the face of it, Ball Four is an odd choice for tracers. Recently, I re-read Jim Bouton’s famous Ball Four and realized there are numerous stories in it begging for the tracer treatment. They were a lot of fun, and Neyer enjoyed them so much that he later did a book of his own, Rob Neyer’s Big Book of Baseball Legends, looking up tracers. It’s tricky as memories get hazy and distort some details of what happened. A tracer is a story an old ballplayer remembered from bygone days that James would research (or rather, have his then-assistant Rob Neyer research) and see if he can locate the event in the historical record.
In the early 1990s, Bill James wrote an annual post-Abstract work called his Baseball Books that featured tracers.
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