Bill James, as Huffington Post writer Sam Stein correctly describes him, is the high priest of baseball number-crunching. His statistics-based analyses of Major League Baseball were at the foundation of Oakland A’s manager Billy Beane’s approach to building a championship team on the cheap. Beane’s experience, of course, was chronicled in the Hollywood hit Moneyball. Stein writes that James is now turning his attention to U.S. politics, which last year entered an entirely new and, if you ask me, weird era in which money is literally no object. Continue reading 'Moneyball' politics: Bill James vs SuperPACs
Tag: democrats
TAL the week after: Take the Money and Run for Office
The weekly NPR radio show This American Life made headlines last month for retracting a story it aired about Apple’s manufacturing problems in China. One of the reasons this was such a big story was because TAL, as it’s known, had a history of doing excellent, detailed, long-form journalism. So when it had to pull back from the Apple story, well, that was big news.
Well, the week after it spent the entire episode retracting the Apple story, it’s back with a hallmark example of the kind of work that’s made it such a popular show — a somewhat depressing inside-the-Beltway look at fundraising in U.S. politics. Continue reading TAL the week after: Take the Money and Run for Office