‘I’m moving on’: Longtime Red Sox consultant Bill James is leaving the team
The stats whiz joined the Red Sox as a senior baseball operations adviser in November 2002.
Bill James, an adviser for the Red Sox since 2002 and a member of the team’s front office during its last four World Series runs, is calling it quits.
James announced on his website Thursday that he is stepping away from the team, writing, in part, “The time has come for me to end my 17-year working relationship with the Red Sox, and I wanted you all to hear about it from me rather than from secondary sources. I’m guessing you may have heard talk about this, but we have reached a point of no return now, so this will serve as my public announcement.”
From 1977 through 1987, James authored the Baseball Abstract, a dense volume once called “the holy book of baseball” by the Chicago Tribune. James came to national prominence after a 1981 Sports Illustrated article, “He does it by the numbers,” chronicled his use of advanced statistics to better predict baseball outcomes. Through the years, James birthed concepts like Win Shares and even the very notion of Sabremetrics, forging a new way of looking at the game that is now commonplace. The Bill James Handbook, which projects statistics for every MLB player, is released annually.
In recent years, James has acted as a consultant for the Red Sox. On his website he writes of his decision:
I leave the Red Sox on the best possible terms. I am still friendly with everyone that I have worked with there, from the owners to the security guards. I still intend to pay the extortionary rates of DirecTV’s baseball package so that I can watch every Red Sox game. Well, maybe not EVERY game; retirement means I don’t have to stay up to watch them play a four-hour game in Seattle ending at 1:30. In exchange for that, next time we win the World Series, I won’t get a ring.
A 17-year run is a long run. I mean, I did the Baseball Abstract for 11 years, and it still defines my career 30-some years later. You look at all of the people who are moving to the sidelines in baseball—Bruce Bochy, and Ned Yost, and Joe Maddon—I’m not only older than any of them, I’m much older than any of them. I was very fortunate to work in and around Fenway for a couple of decades, but my time has come. I’m 70 years old, maximum take-your-Social-Security-dammit age, and, to be honest, I haven’t earned my paycheck with the Red Sox for the last couple of years. I’ve fallen out of step with the organization. The normal flow of work assignments to work products has deteriorated to basically nothing; honestly, I should have left a couple of years ago.
The 70-year-old James, who lives in Kansas, says he will continue to write books.
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