Bill James is one of the pioneers of advanced baseball statistics. He showed us there’s a world out there beyond obvious stats like batting average and RBI.
Here’s his list of the 100 greatest players. He has addressed historical greatness in his excellent book, The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract.
James is also an excellent writer. As I recall, he said in his newsletter that the 1982 Angels lineup which featured old guys was older than prostitution.
I got to meet him in 1984. I was in a very early fantasy league and our commissioner had corresponded with him. James came to our draft. He was really nice and unpretentious. He knew lots more than we did but didn’t act like it. Pictures of my signed copy of his annual book are below.
Sad! 