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.

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.

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.

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.

I made baseball as much fun as doing your taxes!

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

I learned to write because I am one of those people who somehow cannot manage the common communications of smiles and gestures, but must use words to get across things that other people would never need to say.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

On the other hand, if you suggest to a person who has been a victim of a serious crime that we take the issue too seriously, they'll look at you like you're crazy. So that's a really tough issue, whether we're doing more harm than good by paying so much attention to a few cases that honestly don't normally intersect with our lives.

I tried not to write about the O.J. Simpson case too much because so much has already been said about it, but there are a lot of questions left worth asking. However, the case is very useful to illustrate other points. The case is a common reference point because everybody knows the ins and outs of it, more than any other case in this generation, so it becomes useful to reference other points. In itself, there aren't that many questions about it that remain unanswered.

You're just too poor to get rich.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Let's try to find ten good things to say about Albert Belle: 10. So far as we know, he's never killed anyone. 9. He is handsome, and built like a God. 8. He played every game. 7. He has never appeared on the Jerry Springer Show. 6. He was an underrated base runner who was rarely caught stealing. 5. He hasn't been arrested in several years. 4. He is very bright. 3. He works hard. 2. He has never spoken favorably about Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein, or any other foreign madman. 1. The man could hit.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.