Sports statistician Bill James invented a metric he calls “the index of self-destructive acts,” which assesses pitchers by averaging the number of hit batters, wild pitches, balks, and errors per nine innings.
Harper’s
editor Christopher Beha borrowed the phrase as the title of his 2020 novel. Baseball has a role in the story, but the character’s self-destructive acts don’t take place on the diamond. They occur in and around the homes of Frank and Kit Doyle, aging fixtures of Manhattan society and politics, during the early 2000s.