Bill James on 60 Minutes

Posted by Maximum Fun on 17th April 2008

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.