There was an article about Bill James by Dan Ackman in today’s Wall Street Journal. You can also access the text of the story here.

Bill James has become an almost mythical figure in the world of Sabermetrics and this article reads like many of the stories that have been written about him before. It chronicles his rise from lone wolf crunching numbers at his job as a security guard for a bean factory to his rise as the singular influence that started the modern Sabermetric movement. To be honest, this particular article will be one of many that I will use as reference when talking about the social history of Sabermetrics as it relates to individuals, so I won’t rehash that kind of stuff here. Instead, I’ll just concentrate on a few new James’ quotes that are instructive for my project. On the ability for Sabermetrics to successfully predict baseball outcomes, he says:

In any given season there is an immense amount of luck in who wins the division, even if it’s a lopsided race. People are made very uncomfortable by the notion that our lives are random, but there are huge random parts in everything that happens. It’s uncomfortable because it’s our job to drive the randomness out and make the system work.

I find this quote interesting because I think the popular notion that Sabermetricians (and by proxy, science) can reduce things to perfect numbers that do a perfect job of predicting and analyzing. James’ quote is self-contradictory if you think about it. On the one hand, he acknowledges that there is a certain random component to winning a division, something that is beyond the control of us mere mortals. He even extends it to people’s everyday lives and reasons that this uncertainty makes us skittish. On the other hand, he is reinforcing the idea that science does indeed hold the answer, that uncertainty can be accounted for, at least to an extent, and that will make, as he says, “the system” do what it is supposed to do.

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Two pieces, one in the NYT Magazine in their annual sports issue, and one in the “First Person” Column in the today’s LA Times, center around two Sabermetric related items, Baseball Sims, which I wrote about in a previous post, and Retrosheet. The links are to the articles on the newspapers’ websites, but if over time the links become outdated you can read the NYT article here and the LA Times article here.

The articles present two views of Sabermetrics that are different, yet united by a common thread, that I think are relevant to my work. The NYT piece, written by well known writer, Neal Pollack, revolves around Pollack’s involvement in a Baseball Sim league. Meant to be a humorous piece, the first sentence really sets the tone.

If you think you have a dorky hobby, imagine spending several hours a week waiting for a Web site to play simulated baseball games.

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