On Monday, April 3, the Boston Red Sox will open their season playing the Pittsburgh Pirates at 2:05 pm at Fenway Park. On Tuesday, April 4, author Bill James will give the Silas Peirce lecture at 6 pm in the BU Law Auditorium. His topic: “The Arts & Sciences of Baseball.” (Read Bill’s speech here)
I invited Bill to give the fourth annual Peirce lecture because, when I think of him, I think of all that is good about a liberal education of the sort the College of Arts & Sciences offers our students. Bill is not an academic, but he is one of the smartest, most curious, and most interesting people I have ever met. He grew up poor in rural Kansas and experienced the transformative power of a liberal arts education when he studied economics at the University of Kansas. After graduation he took a job as a night watchman at a pork and beans factory, which hardly sounds like the beginning of a brilliant career.
But nothing about Bill’s life story is typical. In the quiet, late hours of the night in the canning factory, Bill pioneered sabermetrics, the statistical study of baseball, and started a subscription newsletter that analyzed the game and its players, and eventually made him famous. His goal was to bring objective, empirical evidence to the study of baseball, which was then full of more false, quirky, but stubbornly held ideas than there were players and managers. The result was to transform how baseball is played, coached, and managed. Bill brings a historical sensibility to his statistical work, and he writes in a witty, conversational style that makes his books difficult to put down. (I just spent three contented hours reading his recent book on the history of scandalous crimes, for instance.)
Bill and I have a personal connection, but Bill and his wife Susan McCarthy also have connections to Boston and BU. My husband and I first met Bill years ago at a party in Lawrence, Kansas, when I was an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Kansas. When we asked him what he did, he answered in a quiet voice, “it has to do with baseball.” And it suddenly dawned on us: this was THE Bill James, inventor of sabermetrics, author of the Bill James Handbook. This was before he began advising the Red Sox, contributing to three World Series championships, and before he was featured in Moneyball and on 60 Minutes. But we had certainly heard of him. Eventually it turned out we were neighbors, and our sons ended up going to school together, even competing on an elementary school physics team. Coincidentally, Bill and his family moved to Brookline for a couple years while he worked for the Red Sox. Susan completed a master’s degree in art history in our Graduate School of Arts & Sciences during that time. I look forward to welcoming both of them back to BU on the day after Opening Day for the Peirce lecture.
The Silas Peirce fund was established by the heirs of Silas Peirce, treasurer of Boston University (1911-1922) and University Trustee (1899-1922), with the intention of providing for special lectures at the College of Liberal Arts. The Silas Peirce lecture series was reintroduced at Boston University in 2014 as one of the signature events of the academic calendar. The series is open to all fields of inquiry covered in the College of Arts & Sciences, and is designed to represent different fields across the years. Preference is given to lectures that will bring our academic community together across multiple disciplines, and that will be of interest to faculty, students, and alumni. Because of Silas Peirce’s deep roots in the Boston area, topics of special relevance to this region are especially welcomed. Last year I attended a superb talk by historian David Hackett Fischer of Brandeis University. I am delighted to announce that in 2018 our Peirce lecture will be delivered by Dell Upton, architectural historian at UCLA. In the Fall we will issue a call for nominations for the 2019 Silas Peirce Lecture.
(Read Bill’s speech here)