Bill James
Bill James
George William "Bill" Jamesis an American baseball writer, historian, and statistician whose work has been widely influential. Since 1977, James has written more than two dozen books devoted to baseball history and statistics. His approach, which he termed sabermetrics in reference to the Society for American Baseball Research, scientifically analyzes and studies baseball, often through the use of statistical data, in an attempt to determine why teams win and lose. His Baseball Abstract books in the 1980s are the modern...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionHistorian
Date of Birth5 October 1949
CountryUnited States of America
When people disagree with you, what you ultimately have to do is persuade people to agree with you - period.
We don't genuinely need more literary geniuses. One can only read so many books in a lifetime.
You know one little way in which baseball changes us? We don't even think twice about Japanese names anymore. You know what I mean?
There comes a moment during a job interview when you're still talking, but you might as well take off your shoes.
Computers, like automobiles and airplanes, do only what people tell them to do.
You can't ultimately dodge defeat by winning close elections.
Crime cases tend to be fascinating until you figure out what happened.
Crime stories show us the part of people's lives they try to keep hidden.
On the other hand, if you suggest to a person who has been a victim of a serious crime that we take the issue too seriously, they'll look at you like you're crazy. So that's a really tough issue, whether we're doing more harm than good by paying so much attention to a few cases that honestly don't normally intersect with our lives.
It's extremely damaging to a fair trial to have people reaching judgment about the case in the newspapers and on the radio before the facts are heard in a case.
The fact is that everybody around a college basketball game - the coaches, the announcers, even the referees at a lower level - calculates when the game is really over. They calculate it with intuition and guesswork.
All societies have these cases. There are many, many crime cases that remain famous from the times of the Romans. The Bible is full of crime stories. You can almost flip to a page. Joseph being sold into slavery by his brothers is a crime story. The Bible is full of crime stories.
Letting him manage in the major leagues is like sending Bo Derek through cellblock A without a bodyguard.
Do we need to have 280 brands of breakfast cereal? No, probably not. But we have them for a reason - because some people like them. It's the same with baseball statistics.