Billy Paultz Reconsidered

It seems legitimate to me to wonder how much PEDs actually work - how much they actually improve performance.
In that vein consider the following piece by FOBPR Bill James. In it, James comes up with a method of rating the most unusual careers in baseball history by assigning point values to a variety of very […]

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Bill James on A-Rod:
“Baseball allowed a situation to develop in which it was in the self-interest of players to use steroids. Now we are very angry with people because they did what the system rewarded them for doing.”
That’s about it. It was possible to be, uh, let’s go with not unsympathetic to A-Rod until the […]

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here. This appeared in Wednesday’s Slate.
Actually I disagree with the Great One on a couple things here - his overview of the NCAA and the relationship between the haves and have-nots of college sports is simplistic at best.
But he does make a couple points that haven’t been made enough. The computer rankings aren’t rankings by […]

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Exactly what I expected- a pleasant feature that didn’t do James’ work justice. I liked Theo Epstein’s comment that James’ value to the Red Sox is more often the questions he asks than the answers, because it suggests the important truth that Sabermetrics isn’t about slide rules and formulas but simply about thinking.
I didn’t like Terry Francona’s, […]

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