Quotes from Bill James

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.

Famous crime stories almost always lead to the passing of new laws.

If a candidate for office starts talking about thinning the deer population or investing in barriers to reduce the number of deer on the highways, the other side will probably just ignore him, because they're not going to know what to say about it. But there is a chance that the issue will resonate with voters in an unexpected way.

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.

There are many things that you can't measure. But the great fun of what I do for a living is figuring out ways to measure things that people previously considered intangible.

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

There will always be people who are ahead of the curve, and people who are behind the curve. But knowledge moves the curve.

There are, I believe, many more false confessions to murders than true confessions.

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

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

Any of us are capable of doing things we're not proud of under the wrong kind of stresses.

Some people give themselves over to their most evil desires, and those people becomes evil. But in general, it's reductive to think of evil as something foreign and separate from the rest of us. Evil is part of everyone. We all have the capacity to commit evil acts.

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

I have always been much better at asking questions than knowing what the answers were.

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

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

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

I do have a family, and obviously I spend as much time as I can with them. Though even when I'm with my family, my mind tends to drift toward baseball.

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.

Famous crime stories almost always lead to the passing of new laws.

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

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

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.

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.