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
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.
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.
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.
Letting him manage in the major leagues is like sending Bo Derek through cellblock A without a bodyguard.