10 minutes with Bill James

[westofyou]

http://www.azcentral.com/members/Blog/NickPiecoro/76897

How has working for a team changed the way you look at the game? (James is a senior advisor for the Boston Red Sox.)

For one thing, I can’t believe how much I didn’t know. I knew in theory there was a lot of stuff I didn’t know, but working with the team exposes me to different things. It’s profound. I sit next to scouts at games and they just see things I would never have seen I guess because I didn’t play the game. An example is a right-handed pitcher will throw his change-up five times as often to a lefty as he will to a righty. I never knew that. I think everybody in baseball knew it except me. I’ve been around baseball for a long time but I don’t pick that stuff up. I still don’t understand pitching patterns at all, basically. Understanding how they talk and how they think is extremely useful to me, although I don’t have the ability to follow through on it the way they do.