George William "Bill" James (born October 5, 1949) is an American baseball writer, historian, and statistician whose work has been widely influential. Since 1977, James has written more than two dozen books devoted to baseball history and statistics. His approach, which he termed
sabermetrics in reference to the
Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), scientifically analyzes and studies baseball, often through the use of statistical data, in an attempt to determine why teams win and lose. His
Baseball Abstract books in the 1980s are the modern predecessor to websites using sabermetrics such as
Baseball Prospectus and Baseball Primer (now
Baseball Think Factory).