Bill James Quotes

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.

There will always be people who are ahead of the curve, and people who are behind the curve. But knowledge moves the curve.

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.

Even if Mays is given every conceivable break on every unknown - defense, base running, clutch hitting - his performance still would not match Mantle's.

I have always been much better at asking questions than knowing what the answers were.

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.

Well, stealing bases adds some runs but very few, and you lose most of the runs that you gain by having runners caught stealing.

I made baseball as much fun as doing your taxes!

Visualizing the movement finally got me over the top after months of practice.

The human race has been in a long struggle to eliminate murder. And we will succeed.

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

Computers, like automobiles and airplanes, do only what people tell them to do.

Serial murders are just the worst stories. It can take an emotional toll on you.

Television is full of fictional and real violence that's turned into entertainment.

In a crime story, the details become tremendously important - where the staircase was in relation to the bed, for example.

There are, I believe, many more false confessions to murders than true confessions.

There comes a moment during a job interview when you're still talking, but you might as well take off your shoes.

We don't genuinely need more literary geniuses. One can only read so many books in a lifetime.

When I was a small kid, I grew up in the newspapers.

You're just too poor to get rich.

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.

I like to feel that I understand little things about sports.

Crime cases tend to be fascinating until you figure out what happened.

It's easy for people to grow up in our society believing that certain lifestyles are risk free when they certainly are not.

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?

Famous crime stories almost always lead to the passing of new laws.

Crime stories show us the part of people's lives they try to keep hidden.

(Mantle) was clearly a greater player in his peak years.

Any of us are capable of doing things we're not proud of under the wrong kind of stresses.

Professionalism in medicine has given us medial miracles for the affluent but hospitals that will charge $35 for aspirin.

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.

Do people really believe there's something different about the eyes of murderers?

When people disagree with you, what you ultimately have to do is persuade people to agree with you - period.

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.

You can't ultimately dodge defeat by winning close elections.

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.