60 Minutes correspondent Morley Safer found Bill James at spring training in Fort Myers, Fla., a shambling giant who strolls unnoticed among the stars and the star-struck fans, about as athletic as a night watchman at a pork and beans factory,
which is exactly what he was.
"I remember by the time I was 14 or 15 I'd begun to realize that a lot of baseball's traditional wisdom didn't actually make sense," James says
"There were certain things that Major League Baseball traditionally believed that I argued were nonsense. One, that you could evaluate a pitcher by his won-loss record. Two, that I -- serious disagreement on what drove an offense," he says. Like batting averages: the oldest way to measure a hitter, James believed that players who got a lot of walks and wore down pitchers were overlooked. So he embraced a new statistic, "on-base percentage," which has become part of baseball's Bible.
As for pitching, he has said that won-loss records do not tell how good or how bad a pitcher is. "The most accurate thing is to focus on the strikeouts, the walks, the home runs allowed. And to evaluate the pitcher on that level," James explains.
So James stresses another statistic: the strike-out to walk ratio. He says for decades managers used outdated formulas or intuition in making decisions. So night after night, he crunched numbers until he came up with new statistics based on facts that would either support or debunk tradition.
Since then the team - that was a congenital loser for 86 years - has won two World Series. James invented something called "sabermetrics," loosely defined as the analysis of baseball through objective evidence. Whether it actually works or not is open to debate, but baseball, with its
unshakeable reliance on superstition, believes the Red Sox have found themselves one extremely lucky charm.
