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
There comes a moment during a job interview when you're still talking, but you might as well take off your shoes.
When people disagree with you, what you ultimately have to do is persuade people to agree with you - period.
I tried not to write about the O.J. Simpson case too much because so much has already been said about it, but there are a lot of questions left worth asking. However, the case is very useful to illustrate other points. The case is a common reference point because everybody knows the ins and outs of it, more than any other case in this generation, so it becomes useful to reference other points. In itself, there aren't that many questions about it that remain unanswered.
(Mantle) was clearly a greater player in his peak years.
How easy it is for a fantasy to grab hold of your foot like a rope, and dangle your life upside down while brigands go through your pockets ... Deal with the life you've got. Solve the problems you have, rather than fantasizing about a life without them.
You're just too poor to get rich.
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.
I try to take large, general questions that are difficult to resolve and break them down into small, very specific questions that have clear answers.
I like to feel that I understand little things about sports.
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.
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.