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Paul DePodesta
The father of sabermetrics, Bill James was an amateur sports journalist who, in the late 1970s, began self-publishing a legendary series of annual treatises on baseball. James’s great insight, Michael Lewis argues, was to realize that traditional sports statistics, such as batting averages, give wildly misleading ideas about a player’s talent. This observation reveals that ballplayers are often dramatically over- or undervalued. James’s shrewd observations and humorous writing style made him a cult figure in the 1980s and 90s. But, incredibly, the vast majority of baseball managers, general managers, and team owners ignored his findings, continuing to base their operations on old-fashioned, deeply flawed ideas of how baseball worked. It wasn’t until Billy Beane and Paul DePodesta took control of the 2002 Oakland A’s draft that a baseball team fully put Bill James’s ideas into practice.
Bill James Quotes in Moneyball
The Moneyball quotes below are all either spoken by Bill James or refer to Bill James. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 4
Quotes
The statistics were not merely inadequate; they lied. And the lies they told led the people who ran major league baseball teams to misjudge their players, and mismanage their games. James later reduced his complaint to a sentence: fielding statistics made sense only as numbers, not as language. Language, not numbers, is what interested him. Words, and the meaning they were designed to convey. "When the numbers acquire the significance of language," he later wrote, "they acquire the power to do all of the things which language can do: to become fiction and drama and poetry.”
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Bill James Quotes in Moneyball
The Moneyball quotes below are all either spoken by Bill James or refer to Bill James. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 4
Quotes
The statistics were not merely inadequate; they lied. And the lies they told led the people who ran major league baseball teams to misjudge their players, and mismanage their games. James later reduced his complaint to a sentence: fielding statistics made sense only as numbers, not as language. Language, not numbers, is what interested him. Words, and the meaning they were designed to convey. "When the numbers acquire the significance of language," he later wrote, "they acquire the power to do all of the things which language can do: to become fiction and drama and poetry.”
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
