A little old, but I finally have time today to do this stuff.  (h/t Roberto)

• Title: “Wonderful Ignorance”; subtitle: “The Past Is Always Going To Be With Us”
• Bill discusses SABR’s beginnings. It was smaller, allowing for more personal interaction, and more populated by “eccentrics”. He reminds us that founder Bob Davids was reluctant to publish more than one article every two years about statistical analysis in the SABR Journal. He says that of SABR’s 70 members at the time, only himself, ...

Seems perfect for the Red Sox.

Have you read My Baseball Diary by James T. Farrell? He wrote a ton of books, most notably the Studs Lonigan trilogy. His baseball memoir has a lot of great reminisces about baseball during the teens. Apparently one of his first literature essays was a high school paper called The Fall of Prince Hal, written in 1920 after finding out that Hal Chase, one of his favorite players ,had been involved in fixing ball games.

I generally dislike the genre. . ..personal ...

And what better day for it than the Babe’s birthday, pt. 2…

At the time Babe Ruth allegedly corked his bat, was that against the rules?

Yes.  And he didn’t “allegedly” cork his bat; he was caught using a bat glued together from three pieces of wood.  Sisler and Kenny Williams were caught with funny bats at about the same time.

Are NFL offensive linemen the only subgroup of players in the big 4 sports for which POSITIVE statistics aren’t kept? Or is there some statistic of measurement used ...

One of many interesting things here is that I don’t think the “Bard wanted to start” point has normally been hit quite so hard.

When teams make a trade, do they try to make sure that the trade works for both teams?

... It is pretty much universal that you have to protect your reputation in negotiations; in other words, you can’t say things about the players you are trading that are just not true, or it will ruin your reputation and make it hard for you to trade.  You can’t tell people that ...

I’m not ashamed. It’s the computer age. Nerds are in. They’re still in, right?

So I’m watching MLB Network’s “Top 10 Right Now”, hosted by Brian Kenny and focusing on catchers, when Bill James shows up with his Top 10 list ...

Kenny: “Bit of a surprise here, Bill. You throw this right out at us: Ryan Hanigan of the Cincinnati Reds. Why Hanigan?”

James: “With Ben Zobrist, those two are the most underrated players in baseball. I mean, Hanigan’s on-base percentage is not only good, it’s very, very ...

do you think it would be realistic for a team to use a 4-man starting rotation…?

... Between 1975 and 1988, baseball went through two separate transitions, both intended to accomplish the same thing, which was the reduction of injuries/protection of arms.    The first transition was from a four-man to a five-man rotation… The… idea… was that it would be OK for [a pitcher] to… face 35 or 40 batters per start, thus throwing 130 to 170 pitches per start (and sometimes more)... as [long as] he ...

Bill James on the Hall of Fame candidates.

Summary Bonds: “you have to honor him, but I’d make him wait”; Clemens: “an obvious Hall of Famer”; Piazza: “sure”; Sosa: “I probably wouldn’t”; Biggio: “sure”; Schilling: “probably above the line”; Lofton: “probably”

Later in the show: Raines: “absolutely”; Walker: “not high on my list”; Trammell: “a Hall of Famer”; B. Williams: “probably not”; E. Martinez: “I think so”; Morris: “I wouldn’t vote for him”; D. Murphy: “I wouldn’t vote for him”; ...

Oh, Paulie DePodesta… won’t see him no more.

I love the All-Decade teams in the Historical Abstract. Do you have a New Millenium team?

1B—Albert Pujols.  2B—Not sure; maybe Utley?  3B—A-Rod (although there are many good candidates. . .Wood Chipper, Rolen, Wright.)  SS—Dirty Rotten.  LF—Bonds.  CF—Carlos Beltran.  RF—Bobby Abreu, or possibly Sheffield.   DH—Papi.   C—Open to Suggestions.  SP—Sabathia, Pedro, Big Unit, Halladay.  CL—Mariano.

if a good fielding ...

I think I did do this in Strat-O-Matic and .850 is about what happened.

To look at the question of how All-star teams would perform I used Teams-on-Paper estimates for the starting lineups in the 1980-84 all-star games. (using the first four starting pitchers who appeared and the last reliever for the staff). League average scores are around 200 with the best teams ever at slightly over 300. The all-star teams scores ranged from 271 to 357 and the predicted won-lost based on these scores were ...