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
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.
Any of us are capable of doing things we're not proud of under the wrong kind of stresses. Anyone can become a drug addict if you let yourself do it and, once you become a drug addict, you'll do whatever you have to to get the drugs. Absolutely, anybody can do it.
The business of popularizing crime is how we expose the faults in our justice system. It's how we expose police misconduct.
Serial murders are just the worst stories. It can take an emotional toll on you.
Professionalism in medicine has given us medial miracles for the affluent but hospitals that will charge $35 for aspirin.
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.
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.
There are, I believe, many more false confessions to murders than true confessions.