Bill went into the army at the start of December 1971. “I believe I was the last person drafted from the state of Kansas,” he says. “They had us raise our hands and swore us in. Then the officer in charge informed us that, because enlistments were ahead of schedule, they had temporarily stopped the draft, right after my group. But they never did have to resume, and then the draft was ended.”

Bill had a harder time than most getting through basic training. “You have to understand,” he says, “as a soldier, I failed every test you can fail. I simply had no ability to do any of the things the army wants you to do. I couldn’t do push-ups. I couldn’t shoot a rifle worth a crap. I couldn’t march fast or climb obstacle courses, I couldn’t assemble and re-assemble a rifle quickly, I couldn’t keep my shoes shined or my shirt-tail tucked in. I was constantly singled out, in training, as the guy who didn’t get it. I very seriously did not think that, if I wound up in Vietnam, I was coming back.”

Bill doesn’t tell stories, but he has one he likes to tell about being shipped out. He says, “When I was completing the final stage of draftee training, they marched us to a center to pick up our unit assignment. The address on my assignment was an overseas shipping center in San Francisco, which meant Vietnam. Then–I swear this is true–we marched back to the training company and, for the first time in weeks, were allowed to turn on the television. Richard Nixon was on, and he was announcing new policies aimed at ending the war protests. One of the new policies was that draftees would no longer be sent to Vietnam. But, Nixon specified, draftees who already had their orders for Vietnam would have to go, but no new draftees would be sent there.

“I couldn’t believe it! They got me again. I already had my orders--had had them for ten or fifteen minutes before the policy was announced. At this point I was absolutely convinced that I was going to be the last soldier killed in Vietnam. I was going to take a bullet, and just as I went down Henry Kissinger was going to coming running up waving his arms, saying, ‘It’s over, it’s over. Stop shooting.’ But fortunately the army was too disorganized at that time to keep track of who had received their orders when, so when I got to San Francisco they weren’t sending any draftees to Vietnam. They changed my orders to send me to Korea.”

He says the main thing he took from his time in the army was the opportunity to work with a first sergeant named Clarence Bray. “He was a fine man, a Kentuckian with a high school education,” Bill says. “He knew how to organize and get things done. This probably sounds stupid, because, as anybody knows, I am not at all organized, but you should have seen me before I worked with Sergeant Bray. I’m ten times better organized now than I was before. I learned at least as much from him as I did from any professor.”
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Bill says, “In our society, we use ‘psychology’ as an explanation for anything we don’t understand. This is precisely the way people identified witchcraft for hundreds of years. The widow Mueller walked by about 3:00 as I was milking my cow, the milk turned out to be sour, there’s no reason why that milk would be sour . . . it must be witchcraft.

“My point is, in order to show that something is a psychological effect, you need to show that it is a psychological effect--not merely that it isn’t something else. Which people still don’t get. They look at things as logically as they can, and, not seeing any other difference between A and B conclude that the difference between them is psychology.

“We don’t understand why the Red Sox played better without Nomar than with him, so we credit it to clubhouse psychology. We don’t understand why Joe Torre is successful, so we claim that he is a master psychologist. This is illogical, and it isn’t really any different than attributing it to witchcraft. People used ‘witchcraft’ to explain why babies died in their cribs and why cats act weird. Using ‘psychology’ in the same way isn’t any better, and it isn’t a service to real psychology. It is actually defending real psychology to resist the bastardization of the term.
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The data needed to test much of baseball’s traditional knowledge always existed, but opinion and lore lorded over research. It’s so much easier to form an opinion than to study a question, like the difference between making babies and raising children. Rather than start with an opinion and build a case, Bill began with the question and searched for evidence to help answer it. “Perhaps the central tenet of my career,” he says, “is that hard information is much more powerful than soft information. Whenever you add hard, solid facts to a discussion, it changes that discussion in far-reaching ways, and sometimes in unfortunate ways.”
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Susie says, “Publishing the books at home he could print what he wrote, just as he wrote it. To have someone he didn’t know come in and start giving advice was difficult for him. He knows what he wants to do, and if there’s any suggestion to the contrary, he tends to take offense. Since I used to read everything and did a lot of his typing, I learned early on that it was a risky business to point out even spelling errors. I just corrected them and went on. If I thought a sentence was poorly worded or needed punctuation, I learned to keep my opinion to myself.” Once, one of her professors called to say he enjoyed the book, but couldn’t resist passing along one thing he wished were different. “He thought it was a little lazy to use cuss words,” Susie says. “I told Bill about his advice, but of course it didn’t do a damn bit of good.”
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By the mid-eighties, the Abstract and its author had become a cultural marker. Newsweek once called the Janus Report “the sexual equivalent of the Bill James Baseball Abstract.” There were references to “the Bill James of education policy,” of suicide, and movies, elections, comedy, weather. . . . A book review in the Chicago Tribune praised an author for being to politics what Bill James is to baseball: “a mix of historian, social observer, and numbers cruncher who illuminates his subject with perspective and a touch of irreverence.”
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The Boston Globe’s Bob Ryan posited in 1984 that Bill could be as important to baseball as Alexander Cartwright, “who codified the game,” and Babe Ruth. Recently it’s been much noted that Bill James didn’t invent statistical analysis in baseball. That’s true, of course, just as it’s true that baseball existed before Cartwright codified it and that Ruth wasn’t the first player to hit the longball chicks dig.

But all three epitomize what Japanese artisan Kaneshige Michiaki meant when he said, “Tradition is always changing. Tradition consists of creating something new with what one has inherited.” Mr. Michiaki explained that people sometimes confuse tradition with transmission. Copying what came before is transmission. Producing something new while incorporating what came before–that’s tradition.
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“What about No-mah?” I asked Bill. “A lot of people thought you screwed up.”

“I thought a lot of people had an unrealistic view,” he said. “The reality is that we didn’t own Nomar’s future. Nomar owned Nomar’s future. Some people wrote about it as if we’d traded six years of Nomar Garciappara. We didn’t own that, nor did we have any great chance of obtaining it.”

What about for the rest of the season?

“We’d lost confidence that he was going to help us win. His effort was fantastic. Sometimes he tries too hard. But it wasn’t working. We had lost confidence that it was going to work.”

Was it a panic move?

“Well, if you’re trying to start a fire, and you have a box of matches, and you start striking matches and throwing them in there, and the fire’s not lighting, you start to feel kind of desperate. We weren’t desperate, but we were getting down to our last match. We felt that the team should ignite, but it hadn’t. Fortunately, finally it did.”

A.L. Division Series 2004: Sox 3, Angels 0
The Sox blazed through August and September to win the Wild Card, then swept the division series against the Angels. David Ortiz won the final game in extra innings with a walk-off homer. Bill and Susie were watching the game at home. Bill says that what he’ll always remember is the move manager Terry Francona didn’t make. In the ninth inning, score tied, Ortiz drew a walk. Bill says, “Tim McCarver and Joe Buck, broadcasting the game, felt certain that Terry should pinch run for Ortiz, try to move the runner into scoring position, and play for one run. Susie was screaming at the television, ‘No! No! Don’t pinch run for him! We need his bat!’ And Terry, thank God, saw it the way Susie did. The gain in the chance of scoring that run wasn’t worth taking David’s bat out of the lineup.”

In the eleventh inning Ortiz stepped up and blasted the Sox into the ALCS.

A.L. Championship Series 2004: Sox 4, Yankees 3
As a lifelong Kansas City fan, Bill came to the Sox with a pre-forged dislike of all things Pinstripe. He points out, “The Yankees beat the Royals in heartbreaking fashion in ’76, ’77 ...