Bill James Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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.
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You can't ultimately dodge defeat by winning close elections.
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When people disagree with you, what you ultimately have to do is persuade people to agree with you - period.
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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.
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Crime stories show us the part of people's lives they try to keep hidden.
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Do people really believe there's something different about the eyes of murderers?
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I like to feel that I understand little things about sports.
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In a crime story, the details become tremendously important - where the staircase was in relation to the bed, for example.
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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.
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When I was a small kid, I grew up in the newspapers.
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You know one little way in which baseball changes us? We don't even think twice about Japanese names anymore. You know what I mean?
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Professionalism in medicine has given us medial miracles for the affluent but hospitals that will charge $35 for aspirin.
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Standardization leads to rigidity, and rigidity causes things to break.
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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.
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Well, stealing bases adds some runs but very few, and you lose most of the runs that you gain by having runners caught stealing.
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Serial murders are just the worst stories. It can take an emotional toll on you.
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Famous crime stories almost always lead to the passing of new laws.