Just a Gwai Lo fun within prescribed limits [?]

Bill James: “I was never a particularly good student. I suppose I was capable of being a good student -- most everybody is -- but when I studied Micro Economics, for example, I would take what I learned there and figure out how to apply it to baseball. I would spend five minutes mastering the concept, 50 hours figuring out how it might apply to baseball. This was a drain on my potential to become an Economics professor. Even when I was in high school, teachers would tell me to put away those box scores and do my homework. Once I focused on writing about baseball, all of that energy was working for me, rather than working against me.”

Rob highlights this James quote after the latter was asked what statistic he looks at first: “Well, I think the more critical question is what do you look at second. I think the things I look at first are the same things everybody else does. Won-loss record and ERA for a pitcher and home runs, RBIs and batting average for a batter. Those are the first things you see and the first things you look at. The real question is what do you look at second.”

Tom Benjamin had a revelation: “Frankly, I was shocked. Everywhere I looked I found bunk. Not only did I find bunk everywhere as a result of reading Bill James, I discovered something else that was every bit as disturbing to me. Most people like bunk! They love it! Most people hate debunkers. James was very obviously right about almost everything and hardly anybody in baseball or the baseball media liked him or believed him or listened to him! They often attacked him! Nothing changed.”

Last month I read Moneyball by Michael Lewis, and it fits very nicely into the minority opinion category (it only now occurs to me to create a category in my weblog content management tool of choice). It's a book almost solely about baseball: for about one paragraph Lewis talks about the implications outside baseball. A weblog comparing baseball to the business world does so far more explicitly, but Moneyball is a book about how the conventional wisdom usually isn't very wise and that how one can profit from being correct but in the minority, and it is in my current list of all-time desert island top five non-fiction books.

(Some time passes and Jeff of Management By Baseball writes in to say that "A weblog comparing baseball to the business world" is not an adequately accurate phrase to describe it, and says that it would be more accurate to say it is about the lessons managers—in the public, private and military sectors—can learn from baseball. Moneyball by Michael Lewis, Jeff says, has a similar subject theme, except it looks at the subject the other way around: baseball managers can learn lessons in terms of human capital from the business world as well.)

Bill James belongs in the Minority Opinion Hall of Fame.

Bill James [via the aforementioned Tim O'Reilly]: “I tried to skip over the parts about myself [in Moneyball by Michael Lewis]. I established a policy many years ago of trying not to read anything written about myself. Mr. Lewis was very kind to me, and I appreciate his kind words, but ... it is unhealthy to base one's self-image on what other people say about you, even if they are generous.”

The more I read about Bill James, the more I like.

Bill James as quoted by Tim O'Reilly: “Every form of strength is also a form of weakness. Pretty girls tend to become insufferable because, being pretty, their faults are too much tolerated. Possessions entrap men, and wealth paralyzes them. I learned to write because I am one of those people who somehow cannot manage the common communications of smiles and gestures, but must use words to get across things that other people would never need to say.”

Also, if you have an interest in baseball and statistics, this article on Bill James is a must-read.