Explore Quotes by Bill James

I would never encourage my children to be athletes - first because my children are not athletes and second because there are so many people pushing to get to the top in sports that 100 people are crushed for each one who breaks through. This is unfortunate.

There comes a moment during a job interview when you're still talking, but you might as well take off your shoes.

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.

We don't genuinely need more literary geniuses. One can only read so many books in a lifetime.

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.

When I was a small kid, I grew up in the newspapers.

Baseball would be a quite remarkable activity if it was the one place in the world where your co-workers didn't have any impact on how productive you were. But in fact, baseball is a high-stress occupation, and those sort of stress-inducing activities... just have a huge impact on how the team functions, I think.

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

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

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.

I like to feel that I understand little things about sports.

You can't ultimately dodge defeat by winning close elections.

Computers, like automobiles and airplanes, do only what people tell them to do.

Crime cases tend to be fascinating until you figure out what happened.

It's easy for people to grow up in our society believing that certain lifestyles are risk free when they certainly are not.

When people disagree with you, what you ultimately have to do is persuade people to agree with you - period.

Baseball does become slow sometimes. It's totally unnecessary. The - you can play baseball fast. You can play it slow, and for some reason, we have chosen to play it slow, you know, which is unfortunate, but nothing you can do about.

The human race has been in a long struggle to eliminate murder. And we will succeed.

I think among the population at large, people are openly fascinated with crime and don't feel any shame over it. It's only the opinion-makers and the 'opinion elites' who turn up their noses.

The business of popularizing crime is how we expose the faults in our justice system. It's how we expose police misconduct.

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.