Top 53 Bill James Quotes
#1. In a crime story, the details become tremendously important - where the staircase was in relation to the bed, for example.
Bill James
#2. I made baseball as much fun as doing your taxes!
Bill James
#3. Crime cases tend to be fascinating until you figure out what happened.
Bill James
#4. Our society is very, very good at developing certain types of skills and certain types of genius. We are fantastically good at identifying and developing athletic skills - better than we are, really, at almost anything else. We are quite good at developing and rewarding inventiveness.
Bill James
#5. Do people really believe there's something different about the eyes of murderers?
Bill James
#6. The human race has been in a long struggle to eliminate murder. And we will succeed.
Bill James
#7. Crime shapes how we think about the world; it shapes social decisions that we make; it shapes our base of knowledge. But we don't talk about it intelligently.
Bill James
#8. Crime stories show us the part of people's lives they try to keep hidden.
Bill James
#9. 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.
Bill James
#10. There are many things that you can't measure. But the great fun of what I do for a living is figuring out ways to measure things that people previously considered intangible.
Bill James
#11. Professionalism in law has brought us the O.J. Simpson case in lieu of justice.
Bill James
#12. 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.
Bill James
#13. You know one little way in which baseball changes us? We don't even think twice about Japanese names anymore. You know what I mean?
Bill James
#14. 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.
Bill James
#15. Well, stealing bases adds some runs but very few, and you lose most of the runs that you gain by having runners caught stealing.
Bill James
#16. We need new athletes all the time because we need new games every day - fudging just a little on the definition of the word 'need.' We like to have new games every day, and, if we are to have a constant and endless flow of games, we need a constant flow of athletes.
Bill James
#17. Visualizing the movement finally got me over the top after months of practice.
Bill James
#19. One of those largish US women writers on the metaphysics of shagging had declared, as if it were a revelation - and a terrible one - that the sex act inevitably entailed violence on the female. Well, of course it did, you well-meaning, trite, benighted duck.
Bill James
#20. We don't genuinely need more literary geniuses. One can only read so many books in a lifetime.
Bill James
#21. None of us are claiming that the statistical analysts understand the game of football as well as the football coaches do, or that our analysis should take precedence over the informed opinions of experts. I'm not saying that at all.
Bill James
#22. When I was a small kid, I grew up in the newspapers.
Bill James
#23. I think among the population at large, people are openly fascinated with crime and don't feel any shame over it. It's only the opinion-makers and the 'opinion elites' who turn up their noses.
Bill James
#24. Some people give themselves over to their most evil desires, and those people becomes evil. But in general, it's reductive to think of evil as something foreign and separate from the rest of us. Evil is part of everyone. We all have the capacity to commit evil acts.
Bill James
#25. Standardization leads to rigidity, and rigidity causes things to break.
Bill James
#26. There will always be people who are ahead of the curve, and people who are behind the curve. But knowledge moves the curve.
Bill James
#27. 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.
Bill James
#28. I like to feel that I understand little things about sports.
Bill James
#29. I have always been much better at asking questions than knowing what the answers were.
Bill James
#30. Professionalism in medicine has given us medial miracles for the affluent but hospitals that will charge $35 for aspirin.
Bill James
#31. It's extremely damaging to a fair trial to have people reaching judgment about the case in the newspapers and on the radio before the facts are heard in a case.
Bill James
#32. There are, I believe, many more false confessions to murders than true confessions.
Bill James
#33. 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.
Bill James
#34. 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.
Bill James
#35. Letting him manage in the major leagues is like sending Bo Derek through cellblock A without a bodyguard.
Bill James
#36. 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.
Bill James
#37. Baseball does become slow sometimes. It's totally unnecessary. The - you can play baseball fast. You can play it slow, and for some reason, we have chosen to play it slow, you know, which is unfortunate, but nothing you can do about.
Bill James
#38. (Mantle) was clearly a greater player in his peak years.
Bill James
#39. Any of us are capable of doing things we're not proud of under the wrong kind of stresses.
Bill James
#40. When people disagree with you, what you ultimately have to do is persuade people to agree with you - period.
Bill James
#41. Computers, like automobiles and airplanes, do only what people tell them to do.
Bill James
#42. Television is full of fictional and real violence that's turned into entertainment.
Bill James
#43. Famous crime stories almost always lead to the passing of new laws.
Bill James
#44. Even if Mays is given every conceivable break on every unknown - defense, base running, clutch hitting - his performance still would not match Mantle's.
Bill James
#45. The business of popularizing crime is how we expose the faults in our justice system. It's how we expose police misconduct.
Bill James
#46. If you can't learn to do something well, learn to enjoy doing it badly.
Bill James
#47. You can't ultimately dodge defeat by winning close elections.
Bill James
#48. Serial murders are just the worst stories. It can take an emotional toll on you.
Bill James
#49. It's easy for people to grow up in our society believing that certain lifestyles are risk free when they certainly are not.
Bill James
#50. If you go to a party populated by the NPR crowd and you start talking about JonBenet Ramsey, people will look at you as if you had forgotten your pants.
Bill James
#51. There comes a moment during a job interview when you're still talking, but you might as well take off your shoes.
Bill James
#52. I do have a family, and obviously I spend as much time as I can with them. Though even when I'm with my family, my mind tends to drift toward baseball.
Bill James
#53. 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.
Bill James
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