Some things you know are wrong

[Undertoad]

In the early years, James sometimes felt as if he was writing in a vacuum. For all the substantial things he was learning, he wondered why the powers-that-be in Major League Baseball didn't seem to be listening.

"When you first discover something like this (that lefty pitchers are harder to steal on than righties) and you print it, you first think, or at least I did, that the whole world is going to be aware of this now and that people will stop saying that left-handed pitchers are easier to run on than right-handers," said James.

"You quickly discover that nobody is paying that much attention, and that you can demonstrate that proposition A is clearly false and people will continue to assert proposition A for the next 100 years anyway. So repeating that experience a few hundred times, by the early 1980s, I had come to think of that as just the way the world was and perhaps was not the first person to realize that you actually do change opinions, it just takes a long time."

(From this piece on baseball analyst Bill James.)

http://mlb.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/mlb/ne...news&fext=.jsp

[godwulf]

Good article. I recently read a fascinating book called 'Moneyball', which has a couple of chapters on Lee - one of the best non-fiction books I've read in a long, long time. Most highly recommended.