Wall Street Journal: Sultan of Stats
How Bill James's analysis has helpd make the Red Sox into winners.
BOSTON–After 25 years on the outside, Bill James was invited to take a seat at the center of the baseball universe. Since his hiring by the Boston Red Sox in 2002, Mr. James, the statistical oracle and author of the Bill James Baseball Abstracts, the team has broken the Curse of the Bambino, won the World Series and is currently tearing up the American League.
As Mr. James, raised on the Kansas City Athletics, is a Yankee-hater from way back, he might be expected to take even more pleasure in the New York team's faltering start to the season. But sitting in a restaurant a long fly ball from his bare office in Fenway Park, Mr. James refuses to revel. "Who was it who wrote the book 'They Only Look Dead'?" Mr. James asks. He also refuses to take credit for the Red Sox rise. "Nothing I do leads directly to consequence, and if it did I wouldn't tell you," Mr. James says.
Indirectly, it's a different story. Starting in 1977 with his first Baseball Abstract, Mr. James transformed a century's worth of conventional wisdom and forever altered the way ballplayers are judged. Applying the scientific method to the game, he and a band of amateur analysts who Mr. James termed sabermetricians (for the Society for American Baseball Research) attempted to answer through objective statistical analysis what factors led to scoring runs and winning games–and which players contributed most to those goals. …
Leave a Reply