Bill James on 60 Minutes
Bill James is the man who invented baseball nerd-dom -- at least in the contemporary sense. He took the box scores printed in the morning paper and drilled down, putting basic assumptions to the test over and over again. Then he took what he'd learned, and wrote it for a general audience in incisive, often very funny prose. I'm interviewing him in about an hour, over the phone, and I couldn't be more excited about it.
Above, a very good segment from 60 Minutes on James, which does a better job than most of expressing what James does and has done over the past 30 years.
Also: Morely Safer is just impossibly old. I should emphasize: he does a great job and as far as I can tell hasn't missed a beat. But he is super, super old.
Labels: baseball
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posted by Jesse Thorn at Thursday, April 17, 2008
1 Comments:
This was one of my favorite segments this year. 60 minutes has not recovered from the loss of Ed Bradley and the near-loss of Mike Wallace. I guess loosing Don Hewitt had something to do with it, too. For years I watched it every week - every segment. Now I skip through 2 out of three. The profiles are usually the worst, but this one managed to be sober and straightforward. Morley Safer is good more often than not, even today and Bob Simon is alright.
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