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.