...........

There is a story about Bobby Fischer, ten years after retirement, showing up in a chess book store in a small town in Europe.  

One person was sitting at a table, going over an old lost game from the 1920's, book in one hand, moving the pieces with the other.  Everybody is peeking up from their books, trying to pretend not to notice that it's Fischer.  Bobby walks over to the table, glances at the game for two or three seconds, and booms "OH, THAT'S THE Nc6 GAME."  And tromps over to scrutinize the wall with books on openings.

A master, present at the scene, goes over to watch the game the seated player is analyzing.  About 8-10 moves later, here comes a tremendous move of Knight to the c6 square, blowing up Black's position and forcing resignation.

There are hundreds of such stories about Fischer.  

We trust that every reader, chess geek or not, gets the baseball point.  If you know what kind of position you have, and you know the ways in which it has been won in the past, you have a prohibitive advantage.  You can see why, given this pattern recognition, that winning a chess game against a weak player is a trivial problem.

............

Bill James has spent his 62* years stomping up and down the halls of baseball history.

There aren't that many rooms in these halls.  There are 100 AL doors on the left, and 100 NL doors on the right.  Behind each door are eight or ten or twelve teams.  James has been through them all, countless times.  He literally mows his lawn, and going up the 17th row, ticks off a list in his mind of oldtime pitchers who won 17 games.  This reminds me, as a baseball writer and chess player, of Bobby Fischer's attitude toward chess and life. 

James doesn't study baseball so that he can publish on it.  He wallows in baseball, all eras of baseball, as Bobby Fischer wallowed in chess.  "To get good," Fischer said, "You gotta love the game."  Bill once said, "once in a while I'll go to a movie and not think about baseball, but it has to be a good movie."

Chessplaying duffers will protest, "sure, I love the game."  Not like Bobby loved it.  Not as much as he loved it, and not in the way that he loved it.

Only these types of people have that type of pattern recognition.  Bill James is an absolutely unique baseball mind.

.............

In 2009, James spent two months plodding -- bearded and imposingly, like Bobby -- up and down the halls of 1900-1999 baseball.  He pondered the question, "What makes teams overachieve?  What makes teams underachieve?"

Actually, the true kernel of James' genius - his love for the game - was that he did not ask quite those questions.  He asked, with the innocent intellectual curiosity of a Fischer, "Which team under-achieved the most?  Which over-achieved the most?" and his insights into the causes of this became a byproduct of his love for the game.

Somebody else might have been most concerned with --- > making sure that the analysis was "correct" and presentable.  Somebody else might have been thinking primarily about peer review.  

James' priority is never the method for its own sake.  James is curious about baseball.  He therefore was free to roam the halls creatively.

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