K.C. Star: Posnanski: Bill James has made the sports world a better place

Joe Posnanski and Bill James, does it get any sweeter!  Ok, ok...so the Cutter Buck Eeeewing shirt has to go.

He wrote about baseball, but in a different way. He was an outsider, and he embraced that role. He wrote sacrilegious things, wrote batting average was no way to measure a hitter, wrote that ballparks could make a break or a player’s numbers, wrote that counting errors was a pretty pointless way to measure a guy’s defense. At the time the stuff was so different from what was in the papers and on television that many people took to mocking Bill James. That was OK. He mocked back. He was better at it.

Over time, of course, people began to realize that most of what Bill was saying was true — or at least a lot more true than the conventional wisdom. Batting average is, in fact, a ridiculously flawed statistic because it doesn’t bother to count walks. Ballparks, as anyone who watched Neifi Perez hit .321 at Coors Field, do have huge effects on ballplayers’ numbers. And you cannot judge a fielder by his errors anymore than you can judge a pitcher by his wild pitches.

...This is the age of questions, and Bill had a lot to do with that. Bill is 58, and he hasn’t stopped asking questions either or writing about what interests him. He has a new book called The Bill James Gold Mine 2008 with a bunch of statistics and essays and stuff. He has a Web site ( www.billjamesonline.net) with a lot of great stuff. And every so often — quite often — he will just send an e-mail to a friend asking whether the 1999 Kansas City Royals had the best young outfield ever.