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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.

Bill James

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Bill James
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: October 5
Statistician
Writer
Holton
Kansas
George William James
Brands
Baseball
Probably
Reason
Need
Needs
Cereal
Like
Statistics
People
Breakfast

More quotes by Bill James

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How easy it is for a fantasy to grab hold of your foot like a rope, and dangle your life upside down while brigands go through your pockets. Deal with the life you've got. Solve the problems you have, rather than fantasizing about a life without them.
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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.
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Famous crime stories almost always lead to the passing of new laws. There's a great many intersections between this unseemly tabloid phenomena and serious social issues and we never get to that intersection because serious people don't like to talk about that unattractive stuff.
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You're just too poor to get rich.
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Standardization leads to rigidity, and rigidity causes things to break.
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A chart of numbers that would put an actuary to sleep can be made to dance if you put it on one side of a card and Bombo Rivera's picture on the other.
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It's easy for people to grow up in our society believing that certain lifestyles are risk free when they certainly are not.
Bill James
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In a crime story, the details become tremendously important - where the staircase was in relation to the bed, for example.
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Computers, like automobiles and airplanes, do only what people tell them to do.
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There comes a moment during a job interview when you're still talking, but you might as well take off your shoes.
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When I was a small kid, I grew up in the newspapers.
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Visualizing the movement finally got me over the top after months of practice.
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It is a very long and very difficult road from a fact to a conclusion. But it is a million times longer from a theory to a fact.
Bill James
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Any of us are capable of doing things we're not proud of under the wrong kind of stresses. Anyone can become a drug addict if you let yourself do it and, once you become a drug addict, you'll do whatever you have to to get the drugs. Absolutely, anybody can do it.
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We don't genuinely need more literary geniuses. One can only read so many books in a lifetime.
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Famous crime stories almost always lead to the passing of new laws.
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Do people really believe there's something different about the eyes of murderers?
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I learned to write because I am one of those people who somehow cannot manage the common communications of smiles and gestures, but must use words to get across things that other people would never need to say.
Bill James
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Crime cases tend to be fascinating until you figure out what happened.
Bill James
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Television is full of fictional and real violence that's turned into entertainment. It's an interesting phenomena and I tried to put it in perspective and tried to think through a few of the real questions that this sometimes unseemly business raises.
Bill James