Should Bill James be in the Baseball Hall of Fame?

Hell, if a joker like Gary Carter is in there, why the fuck not?

Just like the NFL and the NBA Halls, the baseball hall of fame is sa joke.

 

And, of course, such a book could never have been written without many of the statistical tools popularized and brought to wider attention by, uhmmm, Bill James.

And certainly not if the "conventional-wisdom-is-always-right" attitude which James helped to dispel were still in complete control of the world of baseball. Because the "conventional wisdom," now, is that there probably is some valuable information which can be gained from sabremetrics.

 

Yes but not before Buck O'Neil.

 

Yes.

Every once in a while I go back and read his abstracts from the mid-to-late 1980s. The writing is entertaining and the analysis is correct far more times than it isn't.
As a fan, his work appeals to me, and is far more understandable, than almost any baseball material I've read.

 

Marvin Miller should be in the baseball Hall of Fame..
Bill James? No Way!

 

If you believe Moneyball, Bill James is one of the "founders"-- basically -- of fantasy baseball. Which led to fantasy football, fantasy golf, etc. etc.

If true-- based on that alone-- how can you leave him out of the Hall?

 

Sorry, Lugs, James had nothing to do with starting fantasy baseball. In fact, most fantasy leagues use traditional stats that James and his sort abhor.

from Wikipedia:

The landmark development in fantasy baseball came with the development of Rotisserie League Baseball in 1980. Magazine writer/editor Daniel Okrent is credited with inventing it, the name coming from the New York City restaurant La Rotisserie Francaise where he and some friends used to meet and play. The game's innovation was that "owners" in a Rotisserie league would draft teams from the list of active Major League Baseball players and would follow their statistics during the ongoing season to compile their scores. In other words, rather than using statistics for seasons whose outcomes were already known, the owners would have to make similar predictions about players' playing time, health, and expected performance that real baseball managers must make.

Because Okrent was a member of the media, other journalists, especially sports journalists, were introduced to the game. Many early players were introduced to the game by these sports journalists, especially during the 1981 baseball strike; with little else to write about, many baseball writers wrote columns about Rotisserie league.

Rotisserie league baseball proved to be hugely popular, even in the 1980s when full statistics and accurate reporting were often hard to come by. The traditional statistics used in early Rotisserie leagues were often chosen because they were easy to compile from newspaper box scores and then from weekly information published in USA Today. Okrent, based on discussions with colleagues at USA Today, credits Rotisserie league baseball with much of USA Today's early success, since the paper provided much more detailed box scores than most competitors. Local papers soon caught up with USA Today's expanded coverage.

The use of statistics like pitchers' wins and RBI are often scoffed at today by members and followers of the Society for American Baseball Research who prefer to use objective evidence, especially detailed baseball statistics to measure player's performance. Sabermetric thinkers argue wins and RBI often misrepresent the performance of players, since they are largely influenced by "outside" factors like run support and bullpen support (for wins) and runners on base (for RBIs).

 

To add to what spnited said:

"Fantasy" baseball has been around since the early 20th century. Only then they were called baseball "pools." But it was largely the same concept as today: one person on your block, shift, circle of friends, etc., would serve as the "commissioner" and take the bets -- while each person would choose his MLB players for that week, a la his "fantasy team," and whoever's "team" got the most hits, or most runs, or whatever category you were wagering on at that time, would win the "fantasy league." Obviously, the terms are different now -- and there's a helluva lot more statistical categories to choose from, to say the least (to tie this back into Bill James.)

But this type of activity has been around for a long, long time, in various forms. 1980, of course, was the watershed moment -- and rightfully so -- for the "modern" era, if you will, of fantasy sports. But Bill James isn't the forebearer of this, and fantasy sports is barely relevant to this particular discussion.

 

No way.

Fuck that guy.

He ruined baseball by turning it into Nerdball.

 

Bill James was instrumental in leading the Miracle Boston Braves to the 1914 World Series title, but I don't think that's grounds for HOF induction.



Bill James is one of these dudes, presumably the one without the bat.

 

Hi, Joe! Hope you enjoy the message board!

 

Absolutely not.