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
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.
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.
I would never encourage my children to be athletes - first because my children are not athletes and second because there are so many people pushing to get to the top in sports that 100 people are crushed for each one who breaks through. This is unfortunate.
There are, I believe, many more false confessions to murders than true confessions.
Do people really believe there's something different about the eyes of murderers?
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.
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.