Bill James Bio?

Two different posters...I should slow down and read more carefully.

I can definitely believe that he still holds grudges over the failure of Win Shares -- he was convinced that it would revolutionize statistical research and it didn't.

I bought the big Win Shares book online a few years after it came out. Didn't get very far into it. The explanation of the methodology was pretty heavy going, but the bigger problem was that my copy, which was supposed to be "very good," had pages ready to fall out.

Jay Jaffe:

I think one also has to remember that James has been in baseball management for a decade and a half. He’s certainly starting to sound like somebody ready to go to war with the MLBPA, and I think Tony Clark (whose overall job performance is still pretty lousy) was right to issue his rebuke.

He was stepping lightly for a day, anyway. He has a Twitter poll up today:

Most Worthy of the Presidential Medal of Freedom

Babe Ruth
Elvis Presley
Orin Hatch
Antonin Scalia

"Maybe twitter is...an even poorer medium for him than it is for everyone else."

Bill James is still probably my fave baseball writer by peak value. Like my fave rapper, KRS-One, he passed his prime at least 25 years ago, now says dumb stuff, and i have no reason to believe i'd find the current work of either compelling.

bill james is a HOF lock by JAWS but needs to retire so he can gain eligibility

bill james is pete rose if he kept going until 1989

bill james productions, statistical minded

The Modern Game committee voted Harold Baines and Lee Smith into the HOF this weekend. Is it possible the Russians hacked THIS election, too?
Asked by: ajmilner

Answered: 12/11/2018
The Russians were exhausted from getting Vladimir elected last year.

Not bad...

Referring to statements earlier today suggesting Football analysis is limited. . .Cris Collinsworth just said that "Hurries" in football predict sacks better than sacks do. Somebody's doing some pretty good analysis.

— Bill James Online (@billjamesonline) December 17, 2018

bill james being a cris collinsworth fan says a lot

"Somehow we have developed this large contingent of know-it-all baseball fans who bay like wounded coyotes at any mention of wins, losses, RBI or batting average. I never know whether I should blame myself for this or not."

i only bay like a wounded coyote with wins and losses. i zone out at a mention of RBI, and batting average is fine

but yes he should actually blame himself for that, at least partly

I waddle like a penguin whenever Ron Cey is mentioned.

or Burgess Meredith

This made me laugh.

James has been going over all the Cy Young winners and comparing the results to the B-Ref winner (by WAR), the Fangraphs winner, and his own winner by something called D-WAR (I think that's his winner--I can't locate the original explanation). Anyway, looking at the 2013 AL winner, he wrote this the other day: "Hisashi Iwakuma, really? Where is that one coming from? Can you find anyone who agrees with you about this?" ("You" meaning one of the other systems that arrived at Iwakuma.)

In the comments, a reader responded: "Well, win shares:

Iwakuma, 20.5
Scherzer, 19.9

Sort of the advanced metric of record on this site."

Haven't listened, but an hour-long interview with James from a year-and-a-half ago.

http://www.econtalk.org/bill-james-on-baseball-facts-and-the-rules-of-the-game/

Does anyone besides me pay the $3/month for his site? It's his, so he gets to do what he wants, but he's spent the last three or four or thirty-nine months doing these political polls, and he's now ending them because he's decided people are flooding the results for certain candidates. They seemed like a waste of time right from the start. Meanwhile, his HOF polls continue, and some of those are interesting--the groupings are competitive maybe, I don't know, a quarter of the time--but way too many are like this one: Steve Garvey, Orel Hershiser, Clayton Kershaw, Maury Wills. Do you really need to poll that?

I wish he'd just go back to answering reader questions and posting the occasional baseball piece.

maury wills 100%, he's up there with harold baines

i do, however, really appreciate maury wills as an example of what billy hamilton would be if he could hit a little bit

Wills could get by with his OBP in an offense-depressed era

He had a dryly sarcastic tweet up last night aimed at the Red Sox starters. Gone today.

Via his website, Bill James announced his departure from the Red Sox after 17 seasons on “the best possible terms.”

— Pete Abraham (@PeteAbe) October 24, 2019

now he can get down to his true passion: the 2020 election

Wow

Obviously it's not any one thing that triggered this, but I'm sure his tweet the other night--the one that mildly mocked Boston's starters and was removed within a day--didn't help. Just in general, he never should have started on Twitter.

This is what he tweeted, by the way (still comes up in a Google search): "Yankees gave up three in the first. Hey; I thought we had a patent on that strategy."

Zing!

I haven't cared about his opinion on anything in... decades? ... but is he a Trumpist or an anti-lefty grouser?

My vague sense is mostly the latter, but with enough grouse for everyone.

I liked the recent piece on Norm Cash.

I mean, the guy is a genius, come on. He hasn't had anything interesting to say about baseball in decades?

I didn't say that. I said I don't care. He was pretty fascinating to me from '87 thru maybe late '90s. Others built on his work.

He still posts good stuff on baseball, although he sometimes seems oblivious to the fact that he's rehashing old research. (Which, if you invented the field, you're entitled to do, but he'll throw in a minor tweak and treat something like it's brand new.)

My biggest complaint against him the past two or three years is summed up by a tweet from a couple of days ago:

As long as I have been writing, people have been telling me to stick to baseball. On Twitter I just automatically block anybody who says that, but the people who wrote me letters to tell me that 40 years ago, I always wonder if they are still reading or not.

— Bill James Online (@billjamesonline) October 23, 2019

"I just automatically block anybody..."

I understand that endless arguments are wearing. But his skin gets thinner and thinner all the time. I don't follow Twitter, so I don't know what people have been tweeting at him, but I know I was exasperated by his political polls too, especially as someone who was paying for his site. So I'm guessing that some of those people who were blocked weren't saying don't write about non-baseball things (which the Abstracts were full of--if you're a James fan, that was one of the great things about the Abstracts), they were saying just stop writing about this one particular thing. And if you block everybody who's not telling you how great you are, you're left with nothing but people telling you how great you are.

pure clemenza bait

Yeah. . .to be honest, I don't really get why people think The French Connection is a great movie. Can somebody explain that to me in Twitter-Space?

— Bill James Online (@billjamesonline) January 30, 2020

That he's often terrible on movies is one thing you can get me to agree with (he went on some rant about Boyhood a few years ago that I found ridiculous, or at least that he was applying certain complaints to that particular film), but in this case, I'm pretty much on the same page; not a film I've ever been big on.

love a false binary

Do you agree that it is SO unfair that JT Realmuto has to play this season for just $10 million?

— Bill James Online (@billjamesonline) February 21, 2020

is bill james' all-time favorite pro baseball player dick pole

I've been off James's site for weeks, but this made me laugh just now: "I realized that I was stumbling into a Twitter argument, which is the modern equivalent of interrupting elephants during mating, so I exited the situation as gracefully as I could..."

by that measure, elephant bill has tried to sleep with half the savanna

I'm not on Twitter, but I figured as much. He often complains about rudeness, too, seemingly oblivious to his own (and acronyms, ditto). I still like the line.

Novel twist on the-game-was-better-when-we-played: nostalgia for pandemic names.

I still say "Covid-19" is a crappy name for a plague. I mean, Bubonic Plague, Black Death, Red Death, Polio, Consumption, Tyhpoid, Yellow Fever,. . . these are NAMES. Covid-19 sounds like you died of an entry on a tax form.

— Bill James Online (@billjamesonline) April 3, 2020

otm. see also names for military operations

He is decidedly not my favourite film critic.

If one person told me that Citizen Kane was the greatest movie ever, 200 did...it's not that good of a movie. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is a MUCH better movie. Cool Hand Luke is a better movie.

I have a project I have worked on off and on for at least seven years called "My 501 Favorite Movies", which might be subtitled a "a biography through film." It’s about my favorite movies, but also about why I liked them, why this movie worked for me, where I was in my life at the time that I saw this movie, etc. I don’t know whether I am ever going to finish that project and get it published, but in any case, because of the discussion going on in "Hey, Bill", I decided to take my comments about a couple of movies and make a little Bill James Online article out of them. I had ranked "The Magnificent Ambersons" as my 212th favorite movie ever, and "The Third Man" as my 4th favorite ever. Just for the hell of it I will throw in my comments about the 1970s movie "I Walk the Line." Thanks for reading.

I don't know if the proposed title is an allusion to Kael's 5001 Nights at the Movies. (I asked him about Kael in a "Hey Bill" once; he didn't seem to know who she was, but maybe he looked into her.) You can put Butch Cassidy and Cool Hand Luke on the list too. And 496 more.

https://imgur.com/gallery/OhMH53G

It's an obvious reference to frequent On Cinema guest Gregg Turkington's heroic Guinness World Record feat to watch 501 movies in 501 days
https://i.imgur.com/OhMH53G.png

Buried in a long post today on players who had more WAR than their league's MVP:

"WAR just ignores that, and thus implicitly assumes that the Giants are a better team than the Reds. My opinion is that this is Dumb, but then, nobody asked me. But when you apply it to individuals, Mays winds up with more WAR (8.7 to 7.7), while Robinson winds up with more Win Shares, 41 to 38. I feel strongly that my conclusion is right, Win Shares is right, and theirs is wrong. And I still expect to win the argument eventually, in history, simply because I am right and they are wrong."

No timeline on eventually.

I was looking for a different thread where I could post this...some thread on "intangibles" or "leadership" or "old baseball players/writers never die." I think there's one like that somewhere, but I can't remember the title.

Anyway, James on the famous 1979 NL MVP race, which he thinks should have gone to Schmidt or Winfield. However:

But also, let's acknowledge OUR blindness. Willie Stargell had real leadership value. Dave Parker told this story...I'm sure he has probably told this story a thousand times, but I happened to hear it directly from him, so it made an impact on me. The Pirates flew in to Montreal for a critical late-season series (almost certainly 9-16-1979). Montreal was technically in first place, 87-57, .604, the Pirates at 88-58, .603. It was Sunday night; they got into Montreal pretty late. The bus driver who picked them up at the airport "got lost" and drove them all over Montreal for 2 hours before he took them to their hotel, and the guys on the bus were angry about it, shouting stuff at the bus driver. Finally Pops (Stargell) stood up and said, "Guys, don't worry about it. You just remember this when we take the field tomorrow." They beat the Expos two in a row.

Leadership is a real thing. You win games because of it. David Ortiz and Willie Stargell have a lot of things in common, a lot of things. David just has a natural leadership. He knows how to stand up and say something, when to stand up and say something. We won a lot of games because of it. It's hard to put it on a balance sheet, but it's there.