Quotes from Bill James

Bunting is usually a waste of time. The - generally, yeah, I mean, if you think about it, bunt is the only play in baseball that both sides applaud. The - if the home team bunts, you get a base. The home team applauds because they get an out, and the other team applauds because they get a base. So what does that tell you?

Professionalism in law has brought us the O.J. Simpson case in lieu of justice.

Until about 1970 when parents beat their children to death they very often escaped punishment. They would be prosecuted if it was clear and deliberate murder, but if a parent slapped or shook a child and the child died and the parent said the kid fell down the steps, the police virtually never followed up.

From Hurley, Virginia, to Beckley, West Virginia, is eighty-two miles, a little bit less as the crow flies, but you can't get there as the crow flies unless you are a crow.

Later, after Rule became famous, she stopped writing those kind of books and started writing about a different kind of true-crime case. She started writing about real-life gothic soap operas, dream-come-true husbands who turn out to have a dark past and crap. I don't have any interest in those crimes or those books, which I think are written for women, and I haven't been able to read anything she's written in 25 years, although I keep trying.

The fact is that everybody around a college basketball game - the coaches, the announcers, even the referees at a lower level - calculates when the game is really over. They calculate it with intuition and guesswork.

In a crime story, the details become tremendously important - where the staircase was in relation to the bed, for example.

It's extremely damaging to a fair trial to have people reaching judgment about the case in the newspapers and on the radio before the facts are heard in a case.

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.

You know one little way in which baseball changes us? We don't even think twice about Japanese names anymore. You know what I mean?

Our society is very, very good at developing certain types of skills and certain types of genius. We are fantastically good at identifying and developing athletic skills - better than we are, really, at almost anything else. We are quite good at developing and rewarding inventiveness.

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

I try to take large, general questions that are difficult to resolve and break them down into small, very specific questions that have clear answers.

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.

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

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.

Do we need to have 280 brands of breakfast cereal? No, probably not. But we have them for a reason - because some people like them. It's the same with baseball statistics.

Well, stealing bases adds some runs but very few, and you lose most of the runs that you gain by having runners caught stealing.

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.

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

Television is full of fictional and real violence that's turned into entertainment.

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

Serial murders are just the worst stories. It can take an emotional toll on you.