Lots and lots on Bill James

My various thoughts regarding the great baseball analyst

Bill James was a big influence on my statistical thinking, I guess in part because he was the first statistical writer I read, and I was reading his stuff around the time that I started studying statistics. Here are some reactions I’ve shared over the past few years:

• Where sports, statistics, and literature meet: Comparing David Fleming to Bill James

• Bill James hangs up his hat. Also some general thoughts about book writing vs. blogging. Also I push back against James’s claim about sabermetrics and statistics.

• How did Bill James get this one wrong on regression to the mean? Here are 6 reasons:

• Bill James on secondary average

• A collection of quotes from William James that all could’ve come from . . . Bill James!

• Bill James does model checking

• Bill James and the base-rate fallacy

• Why can’t I be more like Bill James, or, The use of default and default-like models

• Confusion over British elections and the relevance to political punditry of a dictum of Bill James

• Maintaining competitive balance in basketball: I disagree with Bill James

• The important “It exists, and it’s not going away” argument, as it applies to economics, political science, sabermetrics, and many aspects of statistics