Intelligence about baseball had become equated in the public mind with the ability to recite arcane baseball stats. What [Bill] James’s wider audience had failed to understand was that the statistics were beside the point. The point was understanding; the point was to make life on earth just a bit more intelligible; and that point, somehow, had been lost. “I wonder,” James wrote, “if we haven’t become so numbed by all these numbers that we are no longer capable of truly assimilating any knowledge which might result from them.”
Michael Lewis, Moneyball, ch. 4 (“Field of Ignorance”)
Michael Lewis, Moneyball, ch. 4 (“Field of Ignorance”)