Bill James (1) (1949–)

True crime is not my usual fare but sometimes I succumb to the guilty pleasure. This 16-hour audiobook did not disappoint with its drama, mystery, and clues.

Of the many murders in the book, the most chilling one for me was the Schultz family in the Houston Heights neighborhood in 1910. Why? Because the crime was a mere half mile (an easy walk) from my grandparents house where my dad grew up, a house I'd visited many times as a child. My grandparents likely moved there when they married, which was a few years after the murder, but still... chillingly close. My grandparents' house is still there (though they are not) and I measured the distance to the crime address on Google Maps.

Recommended to anyone in the mood for something grisly, gripping, and historical.… (more)

The meat of this book, a supposed accounting of the pitches thrown by all major leaguers with a certain threshold of experience up to 2003, is so-so at best. There's just too much that is uncertain or contradictory to be useful, and given the ambition of the authors, this is very damning. The rest of the book consists of a section describing all types of pitches--but frequently confessing ignorance about which pitch was actually which--, a random set of write-ups about a few pitchers, some of whom you will have never heard of, and more statistical-focused musings, but again, rather mediocre. All in all, very disappointing. James is such a god of sabermetrics, that he can pretty much get away with rambling on about whatever strikes his fancy. Neyer is a bit more focused, but still prone to a lack of precision in his writing.… (more)

An interesting investigation by Bill James, the sabrematrician, and his daughter, Rachel McCarthy James, into an early twentieth century serial killer. Their account is a little labyrinthine. Most interesting are the discussions about how rural America changed from 1900 to 1910 with the coming of the wire services, the use of private investigators who were sometimes just con-men for murder investigations, and how both a deep country-wide racism and the police practice of picking up any nearby societally marginal suspect and forcing a confession led to the prosecution, imprisonment, lynching or execution of many innocent people.
There is a common technique of humor in which the last in a series, or just the last comment in a paragraph, is incongruous in some way, or is out of order, or is juxtaposed inappropriately to something else. Offhand, I don’t know what this technique is called, but Bill James uses it; often by dropping the sophistication of his language at the end of a paragraph and using a somewhat cruder simile or word choice than expected. This sometimes works, but sometimes it doesn’t. In a book about a serial killer, it may be not just locally inappropriate, but globally inappropriate.… (more)

Basically, almost 1000 pages of the most self-indulgent writing you will ever see, including James' opinion on pretty much everything from A to Z, with a heavy emphasis on some pretty conservative social comments. I won't say that I didn't enjoy it--I pretty much couldn't put the book down, but there are so many disappointments here. Mostly these come when you get to a player you are interested in and find that James has gone off on another one of his tangents or provided a cryptic one-sentence comment. The book is also incredibly dated, of course, but that's a bit less of a problem, since the players in the steriod-fueled decades that followed don't interest me that much. I haven't actually paid attention to baseball in the last 25 years at all. So, why am I reading this book at all? Nostalgia, perhaps. It was fun remembering some players I had completely forgotten about. James metrics are a bit out of date, however, compared to the latest ones in use.

Also, for what is the 5th printing, it is full of typos and printing errors.… (more)