THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Friday, October 21, 2011

Bill James on NPR

By Tangotiger, 11:05 PM

JAMES: Right. That’s right. That - and there are a lot of people who don’t understand how statistics work and can’t think along those lines and consequently tend to perforce, reject whatever conclusions come out of that line of thinking, and there’s really nothing you can do about that. You can, you know, argue to those people for generations, but the only way you could ever possibly convince them would be to reeducate them, which, you know, you don’t have time to do that. So yeah, it’s a waste of time to argue with those people.

I have a little saying along those lines:

Those who can, do. Those who can’t, learn. The rest, we ignore.

• Sabermetrics • Bill_James

#1 (see all posts) 2011/10/22 (Sat) @ 00:22

Nice interview. Not too informative or substantive, but I liked it a lot. One of Bill’s better ones, IMO.

#2 (see all posts) 2011/10/22 (Sat) @ 00:33

About to go read the interview ... but that excerpt you posted is just ... absolutely right.

Sometimes you read something so perfectly expressed it makes you cry.

#3 (see all posts) 2011/10/22 (Sat) @ 01:04

1. Wow ... the interviewer was one of the 75 people who bought the first Baseball Abstract in 1977.

2. Is Bill James saying that hasn’t read “Moneyball”? It’s unclear from the transcript. Bill says he’s read everything Michael Lewis read [I think he means “wrote"] except Moneyball ... but earlier he says Moneyball is a “very good book”.

#4 Rally (see all posts) 2011/10/22 (Sat) @ 20:40

The interviewer is named Conan. I read this, and in my head he has an Austrian/Cimmerian accent.

#5 pierre (see all posts) 2011/10/23 (Sun) @ 06:52

It’s Neal Conan. He’s been on NPR for decades.

The funny thing, imo, is that James was not a ststistician at all. When he talks about understanding how statistics work, I think he’s really talking about thinking logically about the issue at hand. That and writing clearly and convincingly were what made his stuff so great. It seemed to me that the (minor) flaws in his work stemmed from the fact that, at the time at least, he didn’t understand statistics terribly well.

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THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Friday, October 21, 2011

Bill James on NPR

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