In The Pitch, a Kansas City weekly, Andrew Miller recounts a trip to the ballpark with Bill James. If you want plenty of background and personal stuff, you'll enjoy this.
There's also an interesting recent piece by Ben McGrath in the New Yorker :
To some, he’s a philosopher-hero who brought baseball out of the Dark Ages; others consider him a calculator-punching pedant with too much time on his hands. The once proud and conservative Red Sox, by hiring James to be their Senior Baseball Operations Adviser, have joined the ranks of those teams—such as the Oakland A’s and the Toronto Blue Jays—which are now emphasizing the principles of “sabermetrics” as an alternative to the steadfast reliance on weather-beaten scouts with radar guns, hunches, and cigars.
McGrath suggests that the public is witnessing only part of the management revolution in the game.
“What I’m trying to do is to create ways to think about the real problems of baseball front offices in an organized way,” James had told me earlier in the spring. “I’ve actually had some really interesting insights into the game and developed some very interesting methods in the few months that I’ve worked for the Red Sox, and it’s very frustrating not to be able to discuss them with the public.”
I'm sure similar innovations are being adopted in Toronto; proprietary stats and methods of analysis that the Jays would never share with their competitors. As fans, the ZLC may be "enlightened," but we're still very much in the dark.
There's also an interesting recent piece by Ben McGrath in the New Yorker :
To some, he’s a philosopher-hero who brought baseball out of the Dark Ages; others consider him a calculator-punching pedant with too much time on his hands. The once proud and conservative Red Sox, by hiring James to be their Senior Baseball Operations Adviser, have joined the ranks of those teams—such as the Oakland A’s and the Toronto Blue Jays—which are now emphasizing the principles of “sabermetrics” as an alternative to the steadfast reliance on weather-beaten scouts with radar guns, hunches, and cigars.
McGrath suggests that the public is witnessing only part of the management revolution in the game.
“What I’m trying to do is to create ways to think about the real problems of baseball front offices in an organized way,” James had told me earlier in the spring. “I’ve actually had some really interesting insights into the game and developed some very interesting methods in the few months that I’ve worked for the Red Sox, and it’s very frustrating not to be able to discuss them with the public.”
I'm sure similar innovations are being adopted in Toronto; proprietary stats and methods of analysis that the Jays would never share with their competitors. As fans, the ZLC may be "enlightened," but we're still very much in the dark.
