Words matter. These are the best Bill James Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
You can’t ultimately dodge defeat by winning close elections.
Crime shapes how we think about the world; it shapes social decisions that we make; it shapes our base of knowledge. But we don’t talk about it intelligently.
The business of popularizing crime is how we expose the faults in our justice system. It’s how we expose police misconduct.
We need new athletes all the time because we need new games every day – fudging just a little on the definition of the word ‘need.’ We like to have new games every day, and, if we are to have a constant and endless flow of games, we need a constant flow of athletes.
Our society is very, very good at developing certain types of skills and certain types of genius. We are fantastically good at identifying and developing athletic skills – better than we are, really, at almost anything else. We are quite good at developing and rewarding inventiveness.
Well, stealing bases adds some runs but very few, and you lose most of the runs that you gain by having runners caught stealing.
Do people really believe there’s something different about the eyes of murderers?
There comes a moment during a job interview when you’re still talking, but you might as well take off your shoes.
There are many things that you can’t measure. But the great fun of what I do for a living is figuring out ways to measure things that people previously considered intangible.
Any of us are capable of doing things we’re not proud of under the wrong kind of stresses.
Baseball would be a quite remarkable activity if it was the one place in the world where your co-workers didn’t have any impact on how productive you were. But in fact, baseball is a high-stress occupation, and those sort of stress-inducing activities… just have a huge impact on how the team functions, I think.
Famous crime stories almost always lead to the passing of new laws.
It’s easy for people to grow up in our society believing that certain lifestyles are risk free when they certainly are not.
Computers, like automobiles and airplanes, do only what people tell them to do.
The human race has been in a long struggle to eliminate murder. And we will succeed.
We don’t genuinely need more literary geniuses. One can only read so many books in a lifetime.
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.
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.
I think among the population at large, people are openly fascinated with crime and don’t feel any shame over it. It’s only the opinion-makers and the ‘opinion elites’ who turn up their noses.
Baseball does become slow sometimes. It’s totally unnecessary. The – you can play baseball fast. You can play it slow, and for some reason, we have chosen to play it slow, you know, which is unfortunate, but nothing you can do about.
Professionalism in medicine has given us medial miracles for the affluent but hospitals that will charge $35 for aspirin.
If you go to a party populated by the NPR crowd and you start talking about JonBenet Ramsey, people will look at you as if you had forgotten your pants.
Some people give themselves over to their most evil desires, and those people becomes evil. But in general, it’s reductive to think of evil as something foreign and separate from the rest of us. Evil is part of everyone. We all have the capacity to commit evil acts.
