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Standardization leads to rigidity, and rigidity causes things to break.

Bill James

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Bill James
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: October 5
Statistician
Writer
Holton
Kansas
George William James
Leads
Causes
Break
Things
Standardization
Rigidity

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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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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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Crime cases tend to be fascinating until you figure out what happened.
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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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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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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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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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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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Any of us are capable of doing things we're not proud of under the wrong kind of stresses.
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Do people really believe there's something different about the eyes of murderers?
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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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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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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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(Mantle) was clearly a greater player in his peak years.
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Computers, like automobiles and airplanes, do only what people tell them to do.
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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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When I was a small kid, I grew up in the newspapers.
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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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Letting him manage in the major leagues is like sending Bo Derek through cellblock A without a bodyguard.
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The human race has been in a long struggle to eliminate murder. And we will succeed.
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