JAMES, Bill 1949-

(George William James)

PERSONAL: Born October 5, 1949, in Holton, KS; son of George L. and Mildred (Burks) James; married Susan McCarthy (an artist), November 3, 1978; children: Rachel. Education: University of Kansas, B.A., 1971, B.S., 1975.

ADDRESSES: Home—625 Ohio St., Lawrence, KS 66044. Office—c/o Boston Red Sox, 110 Commonwealth Ave., Boston, MA 02116. Agent—Liz Darhansoff, 1220 Park Ave., New York, NY 10022.

CAREER: High school English teacher in small towns in Kansas, 1973–75; Pinkerton's, Lawrence, KS, night watchman, 1974–77; Stokley Van Kamp (food company), Lawrence, boiler attendant, 1977–79; Boston Red Sox, Boston, MA, senior personnel advisor, 2002–; freelance baseball writer and sabermetrician. Military service: U.S. Army, 1971–73.

MEMBER: Society for American Baseball Research, Project Scoresheet (founder).

AWARDS, HONORS: Casey Award for best baseball book, Spitball magazine, 1986, for The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract.

WRITINGS:

"BILL JAMES BASEBALL ABSTRACT" SERIES

The Bill James Baseball Abstract: 1977, privately printed, 1977.

The Bill James Baseball Abstract: 1978, privately printed, 1978.

The Bill James Baseball Abstract: 1979, privately printed, 1979.

The Bill James Baseball Abstract: 1980, privately printed, 1980.

The Bill James Baseball Abstract: 1981, privately printed, 1981.

The Bill James Baseball Abstract: 1982, Ballantine (New York, NY), 1982.

The Bill James Baseball Abstract: 1983, Ballantine (New York, NY), 1983.

The Bill James Baseball Abstract: 1984, Ballantine (New York, NY), 1984.

The Bill James Baseball Abstract: 1985, Ballantine (New York, NY), 1985.

The Bill James Baseball Abstract: 1986, Ballantine (New York, NY), 1986.

The Bill James Baseball Abstract: 1987, Ballantine (New York, NY), 1987.

The Bill James Baseball Abstract: 1988, Ballantine (New York, NY), 1988.

OTHER

(With Mary A. Wirth) The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, Villard Books (New York, NY), 1985, revised edition (as sole author), 1988.

(With Project Scoresheet staff) Bill James' Great American Baseball Stat Book, edited by John Dewan, Ballantine (New York, NY), 1987, new edition published as Bill James Presents the Great American Baseball Stat Book, edited by Don Zminda, Villard Books (New York, NY), 1988.

This Time Let's Not Eat the Bones: Bill James without the Numbers, Villard Books (New York, NY), 1989.

The Baseball Book: 1990, Villard Books (New York, NY), 1990.

The Bill James Players Ratings Book, Collier Books (New York, NY), 1993.

The Politics of Glory: How Baseball's Hall of Fame Really Works, Maxwell Macmillan International, 1994.

Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame?: Baseball, Cooperstown, and the Politics of Glory, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1995.

The Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers: From 1870 to Today, Scribner (New York, NY), 1997.

(Coeditor) Bill James Presents—STATS All-Time Baseball Sourcebook, STATS Publishing, 1998.

The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, Free Press (New York, NY), 2001.

(With Rob Neyer) The Neyer/James Guide to Pitchers: An Historical Compendium of Pitching, Pitchers, and Pitches, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 2004.

Contributor to baseball anthologies, including The National Pastime, 1985. Editor of Baseball Analyst; contributing editor, Inside Sports, 1983–84.

SIDELIGHTS: "Bill James, with his skeptical approach to conventional wisdom, has forever altered the way a lot of us look at baseball," Ross Wetzsteon asserted in the New York Times Book Review. Since 1977, when he published his first book in the "Bill James Baseball Abstract" series, James has challenged many widely held assumptions about America's pastime through the application of sabermetrics, a statistical science that gets its name from the acronym for the Society for American Baseball Research. As the author once explained to CA: Sabermetrics "is the development and adaptation of statistics toward answering questions. To say where it is useful to the fan … well, baseball has so many records of so many things that when you begin to apply the records to the questions there isn't anywhere that they don't reach. Evaluating strategy and evaluating players are the obvious things, but baseball has an immense dogma, known lovingly as 'the book,' which covers things that people say about games, things that people say about pennant races, about ball parks, about positions, about front offices, about skill, about trades. What do you see when you hold all of these things up to the light? That's sabermetrics figuring out ways to hold them up to the light."

"This sort of analysis," Michael Lenehan remarked in the Atlantic Monthly, "is Bill James's stock-in-trade. Time after time in his abstracts, he takes up a nugget of baseball wisdom—an announcer's offhand comment, a manager's solemnly stated conviction, one of the old saws that abound in the folklore of the game—and tests it against the record to see if it is true." As a result, James has invented formulas such as the "range factor," which arrives at a more representative assessment of a fielder's performance by emphasizing total errorless chances rather than the "fielding ratio" of errorless plays to total plays. But while James's novel approach to evaluating baseball has gained him both admirers and detractors, it is his "refreshing wit," applied throughout his statistical analyses, "which accounts for the large audience he has attracted in only a few years," as New York Times Book Review contributor Lawrence S. Ritter claimed. "James is a rare combination of amateur logician and sociologist, stylist, humorist and stern moralist," John Leo wrote in Time. "In fact, much of the joy of reading him comes from the extravagant spectacle of a first-rate mind wasting itself on baseball."

Wetzsteon maintained that James's strength is not that he has "deconstructed baseball's statistics or demythologized its lore," but rather that he has "tested the links between the two." As a result, the critic concluded, the "debate" about whether Bill James is a statistician or a writer "can be seen as dividing an integrated sensibility in two. Or to put it another way … to regard Mr. James as merely a statistician or merely a writer makes about as much sense as penciling in Joe DiMaggio as your designated hitter."

In 2002 James was hired by the Boston Red Sox to be a senior advisor concerning the club's personnel. It was the first nine-to-five job he had held since leaving his position as a boiler attendant in 1979 at a factory that processed baked beans. Despite working for the Red Sox, he continued to be at the forefront of sabermetrics research, and five years of recent research resulted in the creation of a new statistic called the "win share." This calculates the percentage of a game win that can be attributed to an individual player based on his performance. James also continues to publish baseball books, including his 2004 collaboration with Rob Neyer titled The Neyer/James Guide to Pitchers: An Historical Compendium of Pitching, Pitchers, and Pitches.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Enterprise, April-May, 2004, Tim Rives, "Bill James: Barry Bonds May Be as Good as Babe Ruth, but Ruth Had More Impact" (interview), p. 14.

Antioch Review, summer, 1991, Dan Hotaling, review of The Baseball Book: 1990, p. 463.

Atlantic Monthly, September, 1983, Michael Lenehan, "An Eye on the Records; the Bill James Theory of Winning Baseball," p. 58.

Booklist, April 1, 1994, Wes Lukowsky, review of The Politics of Glory: How Baseball's Hall of Fame Really Works, p. 1417; May 15, 1997, Wes Lukowsky, review of The Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers: From 1870 to Today, p. 1555; December 1, 2001, Wes Lukowsky, review of The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, p. 624.

Boston, July, 1991, Katherine A. Powers, review of The Baseball Book: 1990, p. 33.

Chicago, April, 1986, Ron Berler, review of The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, p. 108.

Choice, December, 1994, M. L. Lecompte, review of The Politics of Glory, p. 637.

Commentary, July-August, 2002, David Guaspari, "Soul of the Game," review of The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, p. 78.

Fast Company, May, 2003, Keith H. Hammonds, "Baseball by the Numbers," p. 20.

Library Journal, January, 1986, Robert L. Rice, review of The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, p. 72; April 1, 1994, Morey Berger, review of The Politics of Glory, p. 105; June 1, 1997, Larry Little, review of The Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers, p. 106; November 1, 2001, R. C. Cottrell, review of The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, p. 100; June 1, 2004, Paul Kaplan, review of The Neyer/James Guide to Pitchers, p. 146.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, September 19, 1982.

Michigan Quarterly Review, spring, 1989, James Gindin, review of The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, p. 291.

New Republic, June 18, 1984, David E. Kaiser, review of The Bill James Baseball Abstract: 1984, p. 38.

Newsweek, April 23, 1984, David Lehman, review of The Bill James Baseball Abstract: 1984, p. 75; June 7, 2004, Bret Begun, "Baseball: All about Belly Itchers," review of The Neyer/James Guide to Pitchers, p. 16.

New York Times Book Review, May 23, 1982, Rafael Yglesias, review of The Bill James Baseball Abstract: 1982, p. 3; December 8, 1985, Lawrence S. Ritter, review of The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, p. 20; May 4, 1986, Robert Strauss, review of The Bill James Baseball Abstract: 1986, p. 41; April 29, 1990, Ross Wetzsteon, review of The Baseball Book: 1990, p. 32; April 10, 1994, Murray Chass, review of The Politics of Glory, p. 20; June 8, 1997, Charlie Rubin, review of The Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers, p. 25.

People, May 31, 1982, review of review of The Bill James Baseball Abstract: 1982, p. 12; June 3, 1985, Jack Friedman, review of The Bill James Baseball Abstract: 1985, p. 18; June 3, 1991, Richard Zoglin, "Holy R.B.I.—It's Statman! Super Statistician Bill James Has Baseball's Numbers," p. 93.

Publishers Weekly, November 22, 1985, review of The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, p. 46; March 17, 1989, Genevieve Stuttaford, review of This Time Let's Not Eat the Bones: Bill James without the Numbers, p. 84; April 18, 1994, review of The Politics of Glory, p. 55; November 12, 2001, review of The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, p. 51.

School Library Journal, August, 1988, Dorcas Hand, review of The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, p. 117.

Sporting News, June 20, 1994, Steve Gietschier, review of The Politics of Glory, p. 9; December 12, 1994, Steve Gietschier, review of The Politics of Glory, p. 55.

Sports Illustrated, February 17, 1986, Jeremiah Tax, review of The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, p. 6.

Time, September 5, 1983; June 9, 1986, John Leo, review of The Bill James Baseball Abstract: 1986, p. 70; August 1, 1994, Richard Corliss, "Willie, Mickey and … the Scooter?," review of The Politics of Glory, p. 56.

Wall Street Journal, May 25, 1984, Frederick C. Klein, review of The Bill James Baseball Abstract: 1984, p. E26; April 22, 1994, Frederick C. Klein, review of The Politics of Glory, p. A14; August 1, 1997, Richard J. Tofel, review of The Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers, p. A12.

Washington Post, April 7, 1983, George F. Will, "Marinated in the Math of Baseball," p. A23.

Whole Earth Review, summer, 1986, Steven Levy, review of The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, p. 118.