Bill James Bio?

important poll

Is there any such thing as a major league baseball player who is underpaid?

— Bill James Online (@billjamesonline) November 8, 2018

brian kenny out here being all 'bill james is a genius who is thinking on a level you don't understand' about a guy who casually interpolates cheating at fantasy football into voter fraud with no evidence

he's about 5 or 6 public fartstorms away from getting fired for being a dumbass, at which point he'll portray himself as a victim of the dum-dums and complete his transformation pro blowhard

I think I've removed bookmark from this thread at least a dozen times... why do I keep coming back?

ILB’s favourite baseball writer has had a busy day. (Check that--my favorite, ILB’s least favourite.)

I have to read up on the fantasy league/election part of this. I expect the worst.

The idea that all MLB players are replaceable is obviously crazy. Max Scherzer and Jose Altuve and all the way down to the bottom 10 or whatever % of players are not replaceable. Back in the Abstract days, he used to say that MLB treated talent like it was a precious, finite resource, and that some of the time they had players at the Triple-A level who were just as good or better than the Joe Biaginis of the league; I think that was basically the beginning of the replacement-level concept, and that seems defensible. If he’s saying all players are replaceable, then again, crazy.

You can look at the question of players being overpaid in three ways. One, in relation to how much revenue a player generates--the idea of putting a value on every WAR and comparing that to what those wins mean in terms of attendance, merchandising, etc. In that sense, there are overpaid players and underpaid players and players who get just about the right amount.

Or you can start with how hard it is to make it to the majors, the idea that you’re one of the best 1200-1500 baseball players in the country. There are exponentially more doctors and lawyers than baseball players; if you win the lottery, you ought to cash in.

In a general sense, though--how a workaday person views professional athletes--sure, they’re all overpaid, with the exception of journeyman who shuttle back and forth to the minors. I don’t see that as an especially provocative statement. Troy Tulowitzki makes more money in one month than I’ll make in my lifetime. So I don’t have a big problem with that idea.

The biggest problem with James right now is how arrogant he’s become. He was ornery and stubborn when he wrote the Abstracts, but 1) that’s not as annoying when you’re a voice in the wilderness rather than (more or less) a well-paid, establishment guy, and 2) his arrogance has grown a hundred fold since then. And he always excuses this the same way: I was right about how important walks were, and I was right about how overrated stealing and bunting were, and I was right about Bobby Grich and Darrell Evans and the Pythagorean Theorem and just about everything else I proposed 40 years ago, so I’m also right about everything I say now. Very few people realized that then, and very few people realize that now--eventually, everybody will. On top of that, the team that employs him has won four World Series since he signed on--I don’t think that puts much of a rein on this tendency.

I’m actually a little surprised the Red Sox kept him on past his first flirtations with Trump (which mostly amounts with him treating Trump as a legitimate office holder--he insists he didn’t vote for him, and regularly calls him ridiculous; when he says more than that, and readers question him, he gets his back up and sometimes starts digging himself a deeper hole).

He's tweeting a lot today; people get in trouble, they tweet. There's a trace of humility too. I don't want him to start censoring himself (and I don't think he will), but if he reins in some of the rudeness he's sometimes prone to on "Hey Bill," I won't mind at all.

(When Scott Woods started the "Ask Greil" section of his Marcus website, I thought Marcus would be a cinch to be ten times ruder and more impatient than James. Much to my surprise, he's been the complete opposite--even with the occasional rude questioner, he's been gracious.)

would you say that bill james could be easily replaced?

major league baseball players are obviously overpaid on a societal scale . . . but it's a $10B/year business. paying the players less means the owners keep more, and for doing what, exactly? now there's a group that's replaceable.

this whole thing arose (i think) from scott boras' comments yesterday about teams tanking/not spending. boras is biased, of course, but i don't think he's wrong.

i don't have the evidence to back this up, but it seems that a team's profit is ever more divorced from its on-field success. there's tv money, profit sharing, parking, free ballparks, whatever. half the teams in any given year aren't even really trying to compete but rather hoping the rewards of shittiness can propel them into an astros situation.

analytics is making this worse! before long, fangraphs is going to tell us that the yankees and red sox are gonna win 95+ games next year, and that the blue jays will win 80 even *with* vlad jr. and everyone will be all like well, might as well keep him in the minors for an extra season of control!

that is a financial incentive to *not* put your best, most entertaining team on the field. imo that, more than infield shifts or long games or pitching changes, is Bad for Baseball. there is no outside force with the authority to make the (anti-trust immune!) teams adhere to a common good; before long we'll have 20 marlins each season and they'll have to expand the playoff field even more just to keep people interested.

anyway, bill james is weird and maybe twitter is . . . an even poorer medium for him than it is for everyone else

Not at all. Not in the good sense (all the brilliant things he wrote in the Abstracts that shape the way I think), and not in the bad sense, either (his more recent misadventures...he is different).

Another thing I've said before: just my opinion, but I think some of his current orneriness stems from never coming to terms with the acceptance of WAR over Win Shares as the common starting point of sabermetrics today. The old thing about the student parting ways with the teacher.

("Not at all" was in response to your previous post, not the one above.)

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..."