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
I think among the population at large, people are openly fascinated with crime and don't feel any shame over it. It's only the opinion-makers and the 'opinion elites' who turn up their noses.
Standardization leads to rigidity, and rigidity causes things to break.
I have always been much better at asking questions than knowing what the answers were.
There will always be people who are ahead of the curve, and people who are behind the curve. But knowledge moves the curve.
Because crime stories reveal an aspect of our personality that everybody has, but which we normally keep very deeply hidden. We like to talk about the good sides of ourselves. We don't like to talk about our hatreds, our distrusts of one another, our secrets, but crime stories drag those things to the surface and consequently they fascinate people and always have throughout all history.
Even if Mays is given every conceivable break on every unknown - defense, base running, clutch hitting - his performance still would not match Mantle's.
Well, stealing bases adds some runs but very few, and you lose most of the runs that you gain by having runners caught stealing.
It is a very long and very difficult road from a fact to a conclusion. But it is a million times longer from a theory to a fact.
The business of popularizing crime is how we expose the faults in our justice system. It's how we expose police misconduct.
Professionalism in medicine has given us medial miracles for the affluent but hospitals that will charge $35 for aspirin.
It's easy for people to grow up in our society believing that certain lifestyles are risk free when they certainly are not.
In a crime story, the details become tremendously important - where the staircase was in relation to the bed, for example.
The human race has been in a long struggle to eliminate murder. And we will succeed.
Men feel challenged when a woman is in danger, so those types of stories interest women and they interest men on a level that the crimes against men tend to draw a different visceral reaction. Again, not saying it's right, but they tend to draw a different visceral reaction, which is that the man was out in the world doing men stuff and something happened to him.