Evel Knievel

Evel Knievel, the red-white-and-blue-spangled motorcycle daredevil whose jumps over crazy obstacles including Greyhound buses, live sharks and Idaho's Snake River Canyon made him an international icon in the 1970s, died today. He was 69.

Bill James, the revolutionary

Thirty years ago, a 27-year-old mostly unemployed freelance writer named Bill James started self-publishing an annual book about baseball. James, who was the last resident of Kansas drafted during the Vietnam War, had recently graduated from college with an English degree, after spending a couple of years marching around military bases in South Korea.

During those marches, he thought about baseball. James was interested in a bunch of issues that the people who ran major-league teams tended to ignore, such as whether minor-league batting statistics predicted major-league success, and how important walks were relative to stolen bases.

It would be more accurate to say that traditional baseball men didn't ignore such questions, so much as they simply accepted certain pieces of traditional wisdom in regard to the answers -- wisdom largely unsupported by any evidence.

An iconoclast by nature, James wanted to write about the extent to which the conventional wisdom of the sport was actually true. But he faced several obstacles.

First, he had never played baseball on any organized level beyond high school. Second, he had no formal statistical training. Third, no one had published anything like the books he wanted to write.

As for book publishing, James was told there was no market for the kind of things he envisioned writing.

So James decided to publish his books himself. His first volume, a mimeographed text of about 80 pages, sold a few dozen copies. But he was an excellent writer as well as an original and interesting thinker, and over the next few years his work eventually came to the attention of a baseball fan - Dan Okrent - who had influence in the publishing world.

James got a contract with a large trade publisher, and his books went on to become best sellers. The more remarkable story is what happened among his readers.

James revolutionized the way a whole generation of young people thought about baseball, and much else besides. One of his readers, a kid from Boston named Theo Epstein, went on to become the youngest general manager in major-league history, when he was hired by the Boston Red Sox in 2002.

One of the first things Epstein did was to hire James, as a senior consultant to the Red Sox organization. In the four years since, the Red Sox, who hadn't won a World Series in 85 years, have reached baseball's pinnacle twice.

Some of the central themes of James' work apply particularly well to his own story. For example: An expert is someone who knows what he's talking about, whether he has any credentials or not. Powerful, wealthy institutions can be run for decades by people who don't know what they're doing. And the conventional wisdom is often wrong.

These ideas, obviously, can be applied far beyond the subject of baseball. They're the sorts of ideas that never fail to annoy and infuriate authority figures, which is why it takes a special kind of person to hurl himself into the face of the solid rock wall of stupidity that defends many a comfortable social institution.

The world needs a lot more people like Bill James.

Paul Campos is a law professor at the University of Colorado and writes for Scripps Howard News Service.

Barry Bonds indicted

Bonds, perhaps the greatest hitter of his generation, was indicted Thursday on four counts of perjury and one count of obstruction of justice. He is accused of lying under oath in December 2003 when he told the grand jury that investigated the BALCO steroid ring that he had never used banned drugs.

The 43-year-old free-agent outfielder faces arraignment Dec. 7 in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, months of legal proceedings - and a federal prison term of about 30 months if he is convicted at trial, legal experts said.

Adrian Peterson 296

Adrian Peterson raced to the NFL's single-game rushing record at the midpoint of his rookie season. Who knows how many more records he could have at the end of the year?

After giving up the longest play in league history on a missed field goal right before halftime, the Vikings turned to their amazing rookie and Peterson delivered - rushing for an NFL-record 296 yards in a 35-17 victory over the San Diego Chargers on Sunday.

Fabulous Moolah

COLUMBIA, S.C. — Lillian Ellison, professional wrestling's Fabulous Moolah, has died. She was 84. Ellison died Friday, according to Dunbar Funeral Home in Columbia.

Born Mary Lillian Ellison in 1923, she was dubbed the Fabulous Moolah after saying she wrestled "for the money ... for the moolah."

She was a longtime champion and the first woman inducted into the World Wrestling Entertainment Hall of Fame. Her autobiography, "The Fabulous Moolah: First Goddess of the Squared Circle," was published in 2003.