Jamesian

This weird and cranky excerpt from a new Bill James book doesn't sound like it was written by the same man whose Baseball Abstract series undermined a good deal of received wisdom about baseball. James's deadpan funny deconstructions of old ideas about what it means to have value as a baseball player also helped me learn to love the game; a love of math never quite took hold with me though. He sounds awfully tired here, and I'm not sure James (who still works for the Boston Red Sox) is as good at drawing broad cultural inferences as he is at explaining Craig Biggio. (Slate)

Baseball could expand in such a way that it outpaces the available latent talent, true—if it grew too rapidly, or if it expanded to, let us say, 5,000 major league teams. There probably is not enough talent to stock 5,000 major league teams in a place the size of North America without some small slippage in ability, even if the transi­tion from 30 teams to 5,000 was carefully managed. If we went from 30 teams to a mere 300, on the other hand, carefully managing the expansion, it would make no difference whatsoever in the quality of talent. That's my view.

American society could and should take lessons from the world of sports as to how to develop talent. How is it that we have become so phenomenally good, in our society, at developing athletes?