IIRC he said the body was originally quite large, and he cut it down to size when he removed the frets.
That's true, but the Baldwin reference in the article was to the neck pickup, not the whole bass, and I'm just guessing that it's referring to some pickups on the Baldwin basses of the late 60s.
IIRC Bill's bass was an unknown Japanese brand from the late 1950s.
I've seen a few Baldwins in stores over the years, not familiar enough to know the pickups or if they were like the ones on Bill's bass.
