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.
Professionalism in medicine has given us medial miracles for the affluent but hospitals that will charge $35 for aspirin.
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.
Well, stealing bases adds some runs but very few, and you lose most of the runs that you gain by having runners caught stealing.
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.
The business of popularizing crime is how we expose the faults in our justice system. It's how we expose police misconduct.
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.
Even if Mays is given every conceivable break on every unknown - defense, base running, clutch hitting - his performance still would not match Mantle's.