Bill James
Bill James (1949- ) is the best known baseball analyst in the world, and he has been a prolific author (Baseball Abstracts, Historical Abstract, Handbook and many other works). He is the innovator of a plethora of performance measures such as Runs Created, Major League Equivalency for minor league players and Win Shares, just to name a few. He coined the term “sabermetrics” to capture this new philosophy of analysis and to honor SABR. His respected status has been earned through his insightful approach and wry prose. James commonly approaches complex baseball situations with probing questions such as “How can a catcher’s effect on a pitching staff be quantified?” or “What is the value of a sacrifice bunt?” The value of his approach and predictions led to his position as a Senior Advisor on Baseball Operations for the Boston Red Sox from 2002 to 2019, a period in which the franchise won four World Series championships.
Related links:
- Read Don Zminda’s profile of Bill James in the Summer 2010 edition of the Baseball Research Journal
- Read “He Does It By The Numbers,” by Dan Okrent about Bill James, in the May 25, 1981, edition of Sports Illustrated
- Read Bill James’s classic article on the limits of sabermetrics, “Underestimating the Fog” from the 2004 Baseball Research Journal
- Listen to highlights from Bill James’s talk on the future of baseball analysis from the 2017 SABR Analytics Conference
- Bill James honored with inaugural SABR Analytics Conference Lifetime Achievement Award
- Listen to highlights from Bill James’s talk, “Wonderful Ignorance,” from the 2013 SABR Analytics Conference
- Read archives from Bill James’s Baseball Analyst exclusively at SABR.org
SABR BioProject biographies written by Bill James
SABR Games Project stories written by Bill James
SABR Journal Articles written by Bill James
SABR Research Topics written by Bill James
SABR Research Articles written by Bill James
SABR Ballparks written by Bill James