bill-james Page index.xml - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Albert Pujols’ career wasn’t supposed to end like this
Albert Pujols’ lifetime numbers are utterly staggering. He has 667 home runs, that’s more than Willie Mays. 3,253 hits, more than all but 14 players, more than hitting machines like Rod Carew, Tony Gwynn and George Brett. More than some guy named Napoleon Lajoie, who played 120 fucking years ago and...

Stupidity Is Also Contagious, And Stats Geek Bill James Has Come Down With A Severe Case
The Red Sox have had a tough go of things lately. Major League Baseball continues to investigate the team for illicit sign-stealing techniques during their 2018 World Series run, even after championship manager Alex Cora lost his job for his connection to the Houston Astros’ sign-stealing operation ...

Everyone's Mad At Bill James For Being An Old Dummy
Bill James, father of sabermetrics, consultant for the Boston Red Sox, and guy who routinely shares the sort of opinions that get him publicly clowned by his daughter, unleashed a doozie last night....

Bill James's Twitter Polls Are Melting My Brain
Sabermetrics godfather and occasional Joe Paterno apologist Bill James has spent the past many years as something of a paradox. You can be confident that he’s smart at something, but a great deal of what he says and does flies in the face of that knowledge....

The Cardinals' Hacking Scandal Stands Alone In The History Of Cheating In Baseball
The St. Louis Cardinals hacking scandal—in which then-scouting director Chris Correa used a former colleague’s password to access the Houston Astros’ player database over 50 times in 16 months—is unprecedented in baseball history. This must have made Commissioner Rob Manfred’s decision on how to pun...


Bill James Calls For Revolutionary Changes To The American Economy
Over at his website, Bill James has a fun feature called "Hey Bill," where he answers questions from readers. Sometimes these have to do with esoteric baseball topics and sometimes they have to do with other things, such as the ongoing debate over James's idea to fundamentally change the structure o...

<em>Wall Street Journal</em> Column Confuses LeBron James With Bill James
Unless LeBron has a writing career we don't know about, Dorothy Rabinowitz confused the Heat star with Bill James and his book Popular Crime in her Wall Street Journal column about an upcoming JFK documentary. To be fair, the mistake isn't that hard to make. They both left an indelible mark on thei...

Red Sox Tell Bill James To Stop Defending Joe Paterno
Bill James, ever the contrarian (he even took a go at disputing climate change a few years back, though later softened his stance), has been taking the unpopular stance on Joe Paterno this week. First it was him saying in an online chat that the Freeh Report made it clear that Paterno did enough to ...

Bill James: Showering With Boys Was "Quite Common In America 40 Years Ago."
We talked about Bill James being a crazy person earlier this week. Well, Bill James was on Doug Gottlieb's radio show on ESPN yesterday and hopped right on the last train to Nutsville....

Someone Actually Thinks The Freeh Report Exonerated Joe Paterno, And It's Bill James
Today was rough for anyone even remotely associated with Penn State University, and there are certainly more developments on the way. What you didn't find today, however, were many folks (at least, high-profile ones) defending the actions of Penn State or the conduct of Joe Paterno, as was laid out ...

Joe Posnanski's Profile Of Bill James Will Get You Pumped For <em>Moneyball</em>
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 un...

Deadspin Classic: The Forgotten Man Of <em>Moneyball</em>
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 h...

If Albert DeSalvo Wasn't The Boston Strangler, Who Was? Bill James Investigates
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...

How Virginia Choked Away A Statistically Unchokeable Lead
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....

Per Bill James's Pitching Metric, Tim Lincecum Was More Dominant Than Don Larsen, Roy Halladay
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....

Sean Payton Is Still Drunk, Still Has A Super Bowl Ring
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....

The Forgotten Man Of <em>Moneyball</em>, Part 1
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....

Your Daily Dead Mets Walking Update
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....
