Bill James

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. ”

In a crime story, the details become tremendously important - where the staircase was in relation to the bed, for example. ”

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. ”

Well, stealing bases adds some runs but very few, and you lose most of the runs that you gain by having runners caught stealing. ”

Professionalism in medicine has given us medial miracles for the affluent but hospitals that will charge $35 for aspirin. ”

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. ”

Crime stories show us the part of people's lives they try to keep hidden. ”

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. ”

There are, I believe, many more false confessions to murders than true confessions. ”

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. ”