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Book Review: The Mind of Bill James

In the military, drill sergeants and other power mongers will set up little tests for you, make you do some stupid, irrational and painful thing just to find out how you react to it. If you pass their little test, then they'll always think you're OK, regardless of whether you're worth a hoot or not, because they have reached a prior conclusion that this is the moment at which they're going to find out about you.

I was at a game in [Kansas City] last May during which Barrett had a couple of hits early, just took pitches on the outside corner and guided them softly over the first baseman's head, the two hits being identical. When he came up the third time I was saying to myself that now they'll make him hit the inside pitch, and they did. The pitcher threw him two pitches on the inside corner, and he turned on the second one and hit the thing a mile (well, maybe 430 feet) for his first major league homer. I was really impressed by that, although logically I knew that it didn't mean any more than anybody else's first home run, because in my mind I had made a prior decision that this was Barrett's test as a major hitter.

I guess we look for personal tics in people who are smarter than we are. It's silly to see Einstein's not knowing his own phone number or not wearing socks as defining characteristics. But if you want to riff on the absent-minded-professor motiff, Bill mixes frugality and disorganization like a true genius. Rob Neyer says that when he was Bill's assistant, "For bookshelves, he had me buy long planks from the Oskaloosa lumber yard and a big pile of bricks from a Topeka brick seller.

[...]

I bought a second-hand office chair for myself back in 1990 or 1991. Almost immediately, I realized that there was a tiny hole in the leather, and thus a tiny spring kept poking through and putting tiny holes in the seats of my pants. I got around this by making sure I had a towel under me, and kept using the chair. Here's the punchline: I was in Bill's office last summer ... and the poky green office chair was still there!"

Reuben pops into the office. "I lost a tooth," he reports. "I swallowed it chewing gum."

"Was it a tooth you were supposed to lose?" Bill asks.

It was. Reuben then instigates a wrestling match with his dad. Bill is huge and Reuben is eleven, so they look like a clip from Animal Planet. That makes me think of a story Bill's most recent ex-assistant, Matthew Namee, told me. One day a column of ants came marching up the porch steps and under the front door. Bill broomed them away, but in a minute they were back. After repeating the action a few times, Bill mused, "You'd think the guys in the back would notice their buddies keep disappearing."