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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
Like
Statistics
People
Breakfast
Brands
Baseball
Probably
Reason
Need
Needs
Cereal

More quotes by Bill James

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Do people really believe there's something different about the eyes of murderers?
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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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I like to feel that I understand little things about sports.
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When I was a small kid, I grew up in the newspapers.
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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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Crime cases tend to be fascinating until you figure out what happened.
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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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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.
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Visualizing the movement finally got me over the top after months of practice.
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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.
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Letting him manage in the major leagues is like sending Bo Derek through cellblock A without a bodyguard.
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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.
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Famous crime stories almost always lead to the passing of new laws.
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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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The human race has been in a long struggle to eliminate murder. And we will succeed.
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Even if Mays is given every conceivable break on every unknown - defense, base running, clutch hitting - his performance still would not match Mantle's.
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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.
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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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Standardization leads to rigidity, and rigidity causes things to break.
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Computers, like automobiles and airplanes, do only what people tell them to do.
Bill James