Clear Thinkers favorite and the original sabermetrician Bill James is the subject of this Dan Ackman/Opinion Journal piece, which provides the usual dose of Jamesian good sense regarding objective analysis of baseball. James, whose original Baseball Abstract in 1977 revolutionized the way in which statistics are used to evaluate baseball players, never worked for a Major League Baseball team until 2002, when the Red Sox hired him as consultant. Among the most interesting observations that James makes in the article is the following:

Mr. James, a rationalist in a church of red-blooded true believers, takes the long view: “In any given season there is an immense amount of luck in who wins the division, even if it’s a lopsided race,” he says. “People are made very uncomfortable by the notion that our lives are random, but there are huge random parts in everything that happens. It’s uncomfortable because it’s our job to drive the randomness out and make the system work.”

Read the entire piece.