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
A chart of numbers that would put an actuary to sleep can be made to dance if you put it on one side of a card and Bombo Rivera's picture on the other.
Serial murders are just the worst stories. It can take an emotional toll on you.
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.
In a crime story, the details become tremendously important - where the staircase was in relation to the bed, for example.
It's easy for people to grow up in our society believing that certain lifestyles are risk free when they certainly are not.
Television is full of fictional and real violence that's turned into entertainment. It's an interesting phenomena and I tried to put it in perspective and tried to think through a few of the real questions that this sometimes unseemly business raises.
There will always be people who are ahead of the curve, and people who are behind the curve. But knowledge moves the curve.
Standardization leads to rigidity, and rigidity causes things to break.
Famous crime stories almost always lead to the passing of new laws. There's a great many intersections between this unseemly tabloid phenomena and serious social issues and we never get to that intersection because serious people don't like to talk about that unattractive stuff.
The human race has been in a long struggle to eliminate murder. And we will succeed.
Baseball does become slow sometimes. It's totally unnecessary. The - you can play baseball fast. You can play it slow, and for some reason, we have chosen to play it slow, you know, which is unfortunate, but nothing you can do about.
Crime shapes how we think about the world; it shapes social decisions that we make; it shapes our base of knowledge. But we don't talk about it intelligently.
We need new athletes all the time because we need new games every day - fudging just a little on the definition of the word 'need.' We like to have new games every day, and, if we are to have a constant and endless flow of games, we need a constant flow of athletes.
If you go to a party populated by the NPR crowd and you start talking about JonBenet Ramsey, people will look at you as if you had forgotten your pants.