Episode 3: Field of Ignorance

Against the Rules with Michael Lewis

Pushkin Industries

Sports, Business, Society & Culture

4.4 • 9.9K Ratings

🗓️ 12 April 2022

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The right kind of expert, at the right time, can change everything. While working as a security guard at a pork-and-beans cannery in Kansas, Bill James started writing about baseball. But writing about it through the poetry of statistical analysis. It took a long time, but James's way of looking at the game changed more than just baseball.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Pushkin.
0:11.2	I spend a lot of my life walking into complicated situations and trying to figure out who really
0:15.9	knows what's going on, who the expert is.
0:20.0	It's not always easy to tell.
0:22.8	But there was one time when it was easy.
0:28.4	This was back in 2002.
0:30.4	I just decided to write a book about something truly weird happening in professional baseball.
0:35.8	People with a talent for analyzing data, were proving that people who ran baseball teams
0:40.9	didn't really know what they were doing.
0:43.2	What was happening in baseball was the first shot in an expert revolution.
0:47.8	We're still living in it.
0:49.6	It goes by different names.
0:52.0	Big data.
0:53.4	Analytics.
0:55.2	Moneyball.
0:56.2	You may not look like a winning team.
1:02.2	But you are one.
1:08.5	Back in 2002, it was instantly clear who the expert was.
1:12.5	His name was Bill James.
1:14.9	He lived in Lawrence, Kansas.
1:17.0	And so the Lawrence, Kansas, I flew.
1:19.6	And I remember two things about that encounter.
	...

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