Bill James Bio?

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.

totally told this story before, but

in march of 1977, when i was 5.5 years old, we went to visit my grandmother in florida. (iirc she lived in boca raton, which was well away from bradenton, so maybe my dad was all like fuck that, we're going to bradenton!)

anyway we went to a pirates spring training game, which was a bit less formal 45 years ago, and i was encouraged to go down to the railing to get autographs, which i did, until willie stargell looked at me and said . . . now what do you say? and like a year later i blurted out 'thank you?'

anyway willie stargell by no means deserved the 1979 NL MVP but he was my hero (and i suspect david ortiz may have had a similar impact, which is why i have no qualms whatsoever supporting him for the HoF)

I had never seen his post-2016 thing and wow

This is just... aggressively ahistorical.

If you want a catalogue of your failures along this line perhaps we will do that another time. (Prohibition, Lyndon Johnson’s great society, Bill Clinton’s trade policies, the Warren Court’s willy-nilly extension of legal rights, triggering a massive increase in crime, Obama’s health care initiative.)

Morbius and I argued about the concept of mystique once--I thought it was a fair thing to apply to certain players, he thought it was an empty abstraction.

Stargell was one of those players I'd apply it to in the context of when I started to watch baseball, right at the beginning of the '70s. The 48 HR he hit in '71 was the most by anybody between Killebrew in '69 and Foster in '77--i.e., for me, the benchmark for hitting home runs. And his 40/40 season in '73, 40 doubles and 40 HR, that felt like science-fiction.

I think my single biggest regret as a baseball fan might be (as I posted on another thread) tuning out in '79 and missing the whole We-Are-Family mania and Stargell's swan song.

Meant to say, that's a great story, mookie.

Had to laugh at this--his arbitrariness when it comes to reader e-mail is often staggering.

What broadcast teams do you like to listen to past or present while watching a baseball game? (If any)
Asked by: chauncynnts

Answered: 3/7/2021
I'm not in the opinion business, you know?

Sorry, this is becoming an obsession: James's arbitrary rudeness.

Reader e-mail yesterday:

A friend and I were discussing the relative values of SP across eras
Asked by: willibphx

Answered: 4/24/2021
Sign Posts? Signal Patrols? Starter's Pistols? Sunday Prayers? Sausage Patties? Snappy Patter? Singing Performance? Street Parking? Sorry...I don't speak acronyms.

James cut the e-mail off there; I'm quite sure "SP" was very clear in the context of the whole question. So the same guy wrote back today:

My apologies, I mistakenly assumed that SP was common vernacular for this audience. To try again, how would you compare the value of two starting pitchers in different eras...

And the question went on there. This time, James answered.

Honest to god--getting the guy to write twice because James wanted to make a point, even though anyone reading would have fully understood him the first time. I remember James, 35 years ago, writing something to the effect that the reason he started self-publishing was because he wanted to be able to mention Babe Ruth without stopping to explain who Babe Ruth was; now he makes an issue of making people explain that SP means starting pitcher.

are these questions are from people who pay him money for the privilege of asking? either way, adler otm

Definitely, and I did think about it--the questioners (as I am) are paying. It's a nominal amount, but still. Another one from a couple of days ago:

Re: Maris/Killebrew...Off the top of my head I can think of three reasons why MVP voters might have looked more favorably on Maris than Killebrew:
Asked by: howard38

Answered: 4/21/2021
Good for you. Let's find something more interesting to talk about.

Followed by:

As you wish. Sorry I cut across your lawn.
Asked by: howard38

Answered: 4/23/2021
There is a difference between cutting across one's lawn and repeatedly insisting that I answer a stupid question.

If he just simply ignored questions he doesn't like, I'd say fine. But he edits them, insults the reader, and publishes them.

(And, just to clarify, the "Ask Bill" section is a small part of what you're paying for, although I tend to read that far more regularly than the rest of the site, only some of which is written by James. I sometimes link here to Dave Fleming's stuff--I like him.)

Perfect example of James's blind double-standard in the "Hey Bill" section.

Yesterday, responding to a questioner: "Well, that's partly true and partly nonsense."

Today, responding to someone else who used the word "bizarre" in connection to something James wrote: "I'm sorry; did you want to remain on the site? This is a discussion among friends and gentlemen..."

"friends and gentlemen", pffffffft

World's Best Hitter List from the Bill James Handbook 2022, Page 8: 1. Mike Trout, 2. Juan Soto, 3. Bryce Harper, 4. George Springer, 5. Mookie Betts, 6. Ronald Acuna Jr., 7. Fernando Tatis Jr., 8. Freddie Freeman, 9. Paul Goldschmidt, 10. Trea Turner.

Springer 4th? I assume Vlad's omission is based on three years' worth of data.

Springer is a surprise. we sure he's not taking fielding into account?!

Going by the title, I'd say no...The thing is, if this is based on the last three seasons--which would accommodate Acuna, Soto, and Tatis's inclusion, and explain Vlad's absence--then Springer had a career year in 2019, a pretty good COVID year, and a good but shortened 2021. If you don't ding him for time missed this year, I'd agree with Top 10, but not fourth.

Freeman/Goldschmidt side-by-side, of course.

world's best hitler list

Really interesting piece, not behind the paywall.

https://www.billjamesonline.com/seasons_in_the_shadows/

this was good

he’s just doing a thought exercise and trying to shed light on less-recognized greatness — and this in no way invalidates that effort — but this

Three of those four categories, however, discriminate against catchers, since catchers do not normally get enough playing time to lead the league in Win Shares or WAR or to have a total which is among the Top 20 in the decade. To address that issue, I awarded one additional point to any catcher who had 29 or more Win Shares in a season.

seems amusingly arbitrary in a field that’s already not short of such. (tbf he also discusses how there is no meaningful difference between players separated by tenths of WAR.)

It felt like a breakthrough of sorts to see him even use WAR for all of this (two years ago, he would sometimes dismiss reader e-mails for simply using the WAR acronym)--he has generally stuck to Win Shares for past studies. I think he's on something like the 5th stage of grief when it comes to Win Shares.

Three of my e-mails concerning a billing question have gone unanswered. I'll vent here.

Reader e-mail the other day: "Where do you rank Scherzer-Degrom in the best 1-2 pitching duos conversation?" (He went on a bit from there.)

James: "I must not be following you. In what sense are DeGrom and Scherzer a 'duo'. In what sense are they better than Carlton and Gibson? In what sense are they better than Roberts and Spahn? In what sense are they better than Newhouser and Feller? I am just not following you."

Someone else followed up today: "An earlier writer asked about a Scherzer-deGrom pitching duo. I'm assuming you hadn't yet heard they were teammates. But to ask a specific question: entering 2022, Max Scherzer and Jacob deGrom will be teammates. They are currently 1-2 in the Starting Pitcher rankings with scores of 487.1 and 466.1, respectively..."

Those Starting Pitcher rankings are James's own creation.

James: (after a few preliminary paragraphs about great 1-2 duos) "In this case? It'll never work. What creates great team pitching is a combination of ballpark, fielding, usage patterns and great talent. Scherzer is almost 40; deGrom is well past 30 and has broken down more times than a 30-year-old Chevy. It won't work."

He may well be right. The bizarre thing, though, is treating the question like it's silly when Scherzer and deGrom are presently on top of his own leaderboard.

I'm glad you're around to document Bill James slowly losing his marbles. Why is he being so willfully obtuse?

I think he's trying to say that it's silly to compare them to other great duos when they haven't played together yet. He could explain himself like any reasonable person would, why does he treat his paying customers this way?

I'm going to send in an application to ghost answer his reader e-mail: "Theoretically great, yes--they presently sit 1-2 on our Starting Pitcher rankings--but let's see if they're healthy." Is that so hard?

(There's unmistakable sarcasm in the follow-up e-mail; I notice readers are starting to push back a bit.)

Interesting James response to Tom Tango today:

"There are critical problems with WAR that you have never acknowledged and the public is completely unaware of, but this is probably not the optimum place to try to discuss them. I'd like, if we can find the time, for the two of us to have an extended discussion of the issues, perhaps to be published as a short book."

"...and the public is completely unaware of" made me laugh--it's like the Kennedy assassination, the truth is being held back--but I would read that book.

"No, I definitely do not think that Trout takes too many walks. Mickey Mantle walked a lot more than Trout does, and as I recall the Yankees did win a championship or two despite this handicap"--that's how you handle an awkward question. (I'm going to refrain from calling it a dumb question, because the guy very carefully explained what he meant.)

"Asking MLB and the players to sit down together and work out a solution to baseball's problems is kind of like asking John Dillinger and Machine Gun Kelly to sit down face to face and work out a solution to the bank robbery problem."

Try again Bill

I thought that was a pretty good analogy.

James took one of my "Hey Bills" and turned it into a piece he posted today (mentioning me by name). That's it; life can't show me anything more.

https://www.billjamesonline.com/vagabonds_and_homebodies/

whoa!

following on clemenza/bill james' "one team" hall of fame methodology, there was a fun post on a cardinals blog applying the same thing to cardinals players to see how much they were associated with the Cardinals vs other teams:

https://www.vivaelbirdos.com/2022/1/21/22883532/how-much-of-a-cardinal-were-the-best-cardinals

Bill James recently took a look at the importance of being associated with one team for Hall of Fame candidates. The idea is that players who accrue most of their value for one team, or mostly for one team, have an easier time making the Hall of Fame than players who accrue their value for multiple teams. If you’d like an imperfect example, Gary Sheffield had 62.1 career fWAR, but he had 12 or more for three different teams, and 6 or more for five different teams. By contrast, Willie Stargell had 62.9 fWAR, all with the Pittsburgh Pirates. James’ research compared those two types of players and all others in the gray area. James found that players with mutliple team associations had a much harder time getting into the Hall of Fame. That’s fascinating... and it’s also not what I want to talk about today. In his process, he developed a fun little tool to determine what percentage a player was associated with a specific team. I thought it would be fun to apply that process to various St. Louis Cardinals and determine how “Cardinal-y” they were.

First, here is James’ methodology:

Suppose that a player has 10 Win Shares (or 10 WAR, or 10 games played, or 10 RBI, or 10 homers; it doesn’t much matter.) Suppose he has 10, and all 10 are with one team. Then his “one team percentage” is 100%.

(10 ^ 2) / (10 ^ 2) = 100 / 100 = 1.000

Suppose that he plays for two teams and has five Win Shares for each team; then his “one team percentage” is 50%:

[(5 ^ 2) + (5 ^ 2)] / (10 ^ 2) = (25 + 25) / 100 = 50/100 = .500

Suppose that he plays for three teams, and has four Win Shares for each team; then is “one team percentage” is 33.33%:

[(4 ^ 2) + (4 ^ 2) + (4 ^ 2)] / (12 ^ 2) = (16 + 16 + 16) / 144 = 48/144 = .33333333

then they apply this to various cardinal players. some interesting ones:

Albert Pujols, 99.57% (almost completely associated with the cardinals despite a decade with the angels)
Ozzie Smith, 98.17%
Willie McGee, 92.53%
Jim Edmonds, 82.12%
Matt Holliday, 63.10%
Keith Hernandez, 62.59%
Terry Pendleton, 54.37%
J.D. Drew, 51.99%
Scott Rolen, 43.40%
Joe Torre, 34.55%
Curt Simmons, 26.23%
Mark McGwire, 19.71%
Steve Carlton, 7.26%
Johnny Mize, 65.79%

etc. fun exercise, and it would be fun to see for other players and teams, too

uh, also the author of the post and various commenters are not sure if they used the formula right. lol. sorry. it's a vox run blog, they get paid like $2/article and online mattress promo codes, the standards are low

"Yeah, I borked it. Full disclosure."

welp. if a mod wants to remove the last 3 posts (including this one) that's fine with me.

First thing I noticed was McGwire at 20%; at the very least 50/50 with Oakland, but I suspect he's much more identified with the Cardinals at this point.

bash bros 4ever

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FL6Z7x1WUAIisif.jpg