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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.

Bill James

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Bill James
Age: 74
Born: 1949
Born: October 5
Statistician
Writer
Holton
Kansas
George William James
Difficult
Specific
Take
Questions
Trying
Large
General
Answers
Small
Break
Clear
Resolve

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When I was a small kid, I grew up in the newspapers.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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The human race has been in a long struggle to eliminate murder. And we will succeed.
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I like to feel that I understand little things about sports.
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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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Famous crime stories almost always lead to the passing of new laws.
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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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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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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.
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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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Letting him manage in the major leagues is like sending Bo Derek through cellblock A without a bodyguard.
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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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(Mantle) was clearly a greater player in his peak years.
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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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Do people really believe there's something different about the eyes of murderers?
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