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It's like Sabermetric Christmas: "Yes, he was driven nuts early and often, and he raged back with a sort of funny, blunt and often searing writing that appealed to an audience nobody had realized existed. Bill James was not the first person to search for knowledge in baseball, not even close, but unlike anyone, he could bring that search to life on the page." [Joe Posnanski] More »
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Moneyball the movie is in theaters on Friday. Eric Walker doesn't appear in the film, and he's mentioned only briefly in Michael Lewis's book, but he was central to the statistical revolution that Moneyball chronicles—the "pebble that started the avalanche," in his words. Two years ago, he told us his story. Originally published Oct. 7, 2009. More »
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During the years 1962-64, 13 women in the Boston area were molested and then strangled by an assailant who came to be known as the Boston Strangler. In 1965, Albert DeSalvo, a convicted sex offender and patient at a local mental institute, began telling people he committed the murders. With the help of superstar attorney F. Lee Bailey, and with the support of investigators eager to be rid of the case, DeSalvo confessed to the killings during a trial for unrelated crimes. No physical evidence linked him to the Boston Strangler cases, and DeSalvo was never convicted of those killings. But for years after his confession the popular assumption remained that the Strangler murders were the work of one man, and that that man was DeSalvo. In an excerpt from his new book, Popular Crime, Bill James, the patron saint of sabermetrics, explains how DeSalvo couldn't have been the Boston Strangler. More »
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UVA was up 10 with 42 seconds left in their ACC tournament game with Miami. That's a lead that a Bill James formula defines as 100 percent safe. Then, this happened: Miami three, missed free throws, Miami three, turnover, Miami dunk, turnover, Miami layup. More »
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Quoth Bill James's Game Score metric, Tim Lincecum (96) was more dominant yesterday than Roy Halladay (94) in his no-hitter or Don Larsen (94) in his perfect game. It's official: two hits are better than none. More »
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Because no one reads the newspaper, and SportsCenter's anchors are too perky for this early in the morning, Deadspin combs the best of the broadsheets and internets to bring you everything you need to know to start your day. More »
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Read Part 1 here. More »
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He calls himself "the pebble that started the avalanche," the man who taught baseball analysis to Billy Beane. Gandhi, someone wrote, sparking MLK's revolution. Today, Moneyball remains a hotly debated phenomenon. Eric Walker is a footnote. Here's the footnote's story. More »
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Because no one reads the newspaper, and SportsCenter's anchors are too perky for this early in the morning, Deadspin combs the best of the broadsheets and the blogosphere to bring you everything you need to know to start your day. More »
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They're talking about Randy Johnson, but does it really matter? I've written slash fiction about this very moment. [SI.com] More »
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The world's greatest stat nerd explains why the BCS computer "rankings" are a complete farce and why any mathematician who participates in it should be ashamed of themselves. But who is he betting on? [Slate] More »
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By now even most casual baseball fans know the story of Bill James. Baseball thought of stats one way, he thought of them another, using complex equations using the quadratic formula and integrals and grep. Easy enough. But perhaps Mr. James has another e=mc² up his sleeve when it comes to the way we think of steroid accusers. Big muscles and home runs? No, how about baldness and acne? More »
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We've noticed the sabermetric Baseball Prospectus-type guys doing a lot of work in the world of college basketball lately. It seems to fit. There's plenty of statistics to play with, but unlike the NBA, college basketball can still be painted with the same brush of blissful, presumed philosophic "innocence" that people assign to baseball. Makes sense to us: Those are our two favorite sports too. More »
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We are a longtime admirer of famed baseball thinker Bill James. (We might make fun of Rob Neyer a bit around here, but we — like a lot of you, we suspect — have Neyer to thank for our initial awareness of James' work.) He opened our eyes to so many new concepts in the game we love, and, all told, we think he's probably earned a spot in the Hall of Fame someday. That said, it must be mentioned: Every time James comes down off the mount to speak to the masses anymore, he comes across as a real dick. More »
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Ever wonder who the ugliest baseball player of all time was? (This sounds like every after-the-fourth-beer sports-bar conversation we've ever had.) A deeply entertaining discussion is going on about this at Athletics Nation and, by all accounts, the ugliest player in baseball history had to have been Don Mossi, a former A's pitcher and the man bearded geek god Bill James said looked "like Gary Gaetti escaping from Devil's Island." More »
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We know we re going all financial on you today over here, but here s something interesting: The new chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, appointed by President Bush, is a, of all things, sabermatrician. Yep: He s a Bill James cultist. More »
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We're big fans of Fire Joe Morgan's weekly deconstructions of ESPN analyst Joe Morgan's chats on ESPN.com — even if the chats of late, in the words of Fire Joe Morgan itself, have had "entirely un-Morgan-like reason and coherence" — and, to have some fun themselves, the folks at St. Louis Cardinals blog Cardnilly have broken down the most recent ESPN chat with Three Nights In August author Buzz Bissinger. More »
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