Bill James
From BR Bullpen
This is the page for Bill James, the author. For William Henry "Big Bill" James (1911-19) see Bill James (jamesbi01). For William Lawrence "Seattle Bill" James (1913-1919) see Bill James (jamesbi02).
Bill James
- Born: June 18, 1949 in Mayetta, KS USA
Bill James is one of the most prominent authors on the subject of baseball from a statistical perspective. Though not a statistician by trade, James pioneered the field of sabermetrics with his insightful, articulate, creative, knowledgable, occasionally comical and always idiosyncratic writings on a plethora of baseball-related subjects, many of which he invented himself. He is credited with coining the term sabermetrics, and is considered by most to be the father of the sabermetric movement. While many subsequent authors have refined and expounded upon James' theories, which often lacked citation and statistical rigor, it would be hard to argue that anyone has done more than James to advance the field of sabermetrics. He is currently employed by the Boston Red Sox as a Senior Baseball Operations Advisor.
He began writing The Bill James Baseball Abstract in the 1970's, and became quite well-known in the 1980's for his opinions. While his opinions were at first often quite scathing in regard to certain ballplayers, as time went on he began to have personal contact with more and more of them in his work, and he seems to have chosen to be less critical of many active players. He has acknowledged being involved in arbitration proceedings or other matters with a variety of ballplayers, including George Bell and Tim Raines.
James is the creator of the statistics Win Shares and Runs Created.
The author of The Bill James Baseball Abstract series of books, the two editions of The Historical Baseball Abstract, Win Shares, and Politics of Glory.
There are no similarity scores for non-players, but Henry Chadwick comes to mind as a comparison to Bill James. When Chadwick was creating statistical methods to evaluate baseball performance, most players had little power and drew few walks, so batting average was a relatively suitable measure of offensive performance. It was up to Bill James, over one hundred years later, to point out that the game had changed greatly, and that many new ways of evaluating performance were needed.
Although Scott Gray's 2006 book about James refers to him in the title as a "Complete Outsider", he was not really that. In other industries, it is not unusual for knowledgeable customers to have an impact on product development, and to borrow a concept from the computer world, one could easily refer to James as a "super user". Major league baseball, being very staid, simply took longer to adopt James' ideas than many other industries would have taken.
[edit] Further Reading
- Scott Gray: The Mind of Bill James: How a Complete Outsider Changed Baseball, Doubleday, New York, NY, 2006.
- Gregory Pierce, ed.: How Bill James Changed our View of Baseball, by Colleagues, Critics, Competitors and Just Plain Fans, ACTA Sports, Skokie, IL, 2007.
