re usa mcweekly stats rvesterm vma cc nd edu writes some discussion about whether elias is money grubbing deleted funny it seems to me that the stats major league and minor league handbooks which are nothing but collections of statistics are authored by bill james and stats inc and howe for the minor league handbook and i am not sure how the bill james player ratings book qualifies as a book with statistics while the elias analyst is a statistics book the analyst contains more stats sure but it also contains more dialogue finally the point was not about the word statistics it was about money grubbing i don t see how anyone who has looked at the bill james player ratings book cannot consider him money grubbing bob vesterman some thoughts and facts bill james is a partial owner of stats inc however he has almost nothing to do with the day to day operations of the company although he does have significant input into the design of the books that bear his name the handbook but not the scoreboard to the best of my knowledge the only things that bill actually writes for stats are the predictions section of the handbook and the bill james fantasy baseball rulebook the debate over elias goes way back bill james early stuff was hampered by the fact that elias would not give access to their stats at any price project scoresheet and later stats were founded to fill this void you can call stats and ask them for a report on just about anything in their database and they will provide it for a price of course or you could just log into their online system and look at the data yourself having attempted to pry numbers from elias in the past football not baseball they just don t do that in stats eyes the high ground comes from making the information available at all that being said i m pretty dissapointed by bill s book this year too i am given to understant that it was mostly a response to the publishers desire to have the book come out sooner than april hope this makes things just a little bit clearer bias alert i am a former part time employee of stats noel rappin noel chaos cs brandeis edu
