George William James (born October 5, 1949)[1][2] is an American baseball writer, historian, and statistician whose work has been widely influential.

[4] In 2003, James was hired as senior advisor on Baseball Operations for the Boston Red Sox and worked for the team for 17 years during which they won four World Series championships.

[1] An aspiring writer and obsessive fan, James began writing baseball articles after leaving the United States Army in his mid-twenties.

Unlike most writers, his pieces did not recount games in epic terms or offer insights gleaned from interviews with players.

The first edition, titled 1977 Baseball Abstract: Featuring 18 categories of statistical information that you just can't find anywhere else, presented 68 pages of in-depth statistics compiled from James's study of box scores from the preceding season and was offered for sale through a small advertisement in The Sporting News.

[10] The first three editions of the Baseball Abstract garnered respect for James's work, including a very favorable review by Daniel Okrent in Sports Illustrated.

STATS, Inc., the company James joined, provided data and analysis to every major media outlet before being acquired by Fox Sports in 2001.

[20] To James, context is paramount: he was among the first to emphasize the importance of adjusting traditional statistics for park factors and to stress the role of luck in a pitcher's win–loss record.

Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane began applying sabermetric principles to running his low-budget team in the early 2000s, to notable effect, as chronicled in Michael Lewis' book Moneyball.

[24] Red Sox manager Grady Little was never fully comfortable with the setup, and designated unofficial closers and reshuffled roles after a bad outing.

[26] Houston Astros manager Phil Garner also employed a relief ace model with his use of Brad Lidge in the 2004 postseason.

Indeed, although James was typically tight-lipped about his activities on behalf of the Red Sox, he is credited with advocating some of the moves that led to the team's first World Series championship in 86 years, including the signing of non-tendered free agent David Ortiz, the trade for Mark Bellhorn, and the team's increased emphasis on on-base percentage.

After the Red Sox suffered through a disastrous 2012 season, Henry stated that James had fallen "out of favor [in the front office] over the last few years for reasons I really don't understand.

The latter is an attempt to link scores of murders of entire families in the early 20th century United States to a single perpetrator.

[30] Michael Lewis, in his 2003 book Moneyball, dedicates a chapter to James's career and sabermetrics as background for his portrayal of Billy Beane and the Oakland Athletics' unlikely success.

James reproached commissioner Giamatti and his successor, Fay Vincent, for their acceptance of the Dowd Report as the final word on Rose's gambling.

Derek Zumsteg of Baseball Prospectus wrote an exhaustive review of the case James made and concluded: "James' defense of Rose is filled with oversights, errors in judgment, failures in research, and is a great disservice to the many people who have looked to him for a balanced and fair take on this complicated and important issue.

On December 11, 2011, James published an article called "The Trial of Penn State", depicting an imaginary trial in which Penn State defended itself against charges of "acting rashly and irresponsibly in the matter of Joe Paterno, in such a manner that [they] defamed, libeled and slandered Paterno, unfairly demolishing his reputation.

On November 7, 2018, James participated in a Twitter conversation regarding comments made by agent Scott Boras about teams "tanking".

The players are NOT the game, any more than the beer vendors are.This was arguably consistent with thoughts James had publicly expressed prior to his affiliation with the Red Sox.

In an article in The 1988 Bill James Baseball Abstract, he had written:This nation could support, without any detectable loss of player quality, at a very, very minimum, 200 major league teams.

[46]Nonetheless, in the context of James's association with the Red Sox front office and baseball's checkered labor history (including alleged collusion amongst the owners in the previous offseason to curb free agent salaries[47]), the tweets were taken by many as inflammatory.

Major League Baseball Players Association executive director Tony Clark called James's comments "reckless and insulting".