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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.
Bill James -
Professionalism in law has brought us the O.J. Simpson case in lieu of justice.
Bill James
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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.
Bill James -
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.
Bill James -
If a candidate for office starts talking about thinning the deer population or investing in barriers to reduce the number of deer on the highways, the other side will probably just ignore him, because they're not going to know what to say about it. But there is a chance that the issue will resonate with voters in an unexpected way.
Bill James -
None of us are claiming that the statistical analysts understand the game of football as well as the football coaches do, or that our analysis should take precedence over the informed opinions of experts. I'm not saying that at all.
Bill James -
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.
Bill James -
Television is full of fictional and real violence that's turned into entertainment.
Bill James
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Bunting is usually a waste of time. The - generally, yeah, I mean, if you think about it, bunt is the only play in baseball that both sides applaud. The - if the home team bunts, you get a base. The home team applauds because they get an out, and the other team applauds because they get a base. So what does that tell you?
Bill James -
There comes a moment during a job interview when you're still talking, but you might as well take off your shoes.
Bill James -
It's extremely damaging to a fair trial to have people reaching judgment about the case in the newspapers and on the radio before the facts are heard in a case.
Bill James -
I would never encourage my children to be athletes - first because my children are not athletes and second because there are so many people pushing to get to the top in sports that 100 people are crushed for each one who breaks through. This is unfortunate.
Bill James -
The human race has been in a long struggle to eliminate murder. And we will succeed.
Bill James -
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.
Bill James
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Crime cases tend to be fascinating until you figure out what happened.
Bill James -
I have always been much better at asking questions than knowing what the answers were.
Bill James -
There are, I believe, many more false confessions to murders than true confessions.
Bill James -
The fact is that everybody around a college basketball game - the coaches, the announcers, even the referees at a lower level - calculates when the game is really over. They calculate it with intuition and guesswork.
Bill James -
Any of us are capable of doing things we're not proud of under the wrong kind of stresses.
Bill James -
We don't genuinely need more literary geniuses. One can only read so many books in a lifetime.
Bill James
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It's easy for people to grow up in our society believing that certain lifestyles are risk free when they certainly are not.
Bill James -
The business of popularizing crime is how we expose the faults in our justice system. It's how we expose police misconduct.
Bill James -
Computers, like automobiles and airplanes, do only what people tell them to do.
Bill James -
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.
Bill James