Bill James is featured on Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt’s Freakonomics blog today answering readers’ questions. The beauty of Bill James thinking, as Dubner describes it, is “his reality-based view of the world”.

Here’s a typical question and answer in which James innocuously subverts the thesis of Moneyball:

Q: Generally, who should have a larger role in evaluating college and minor league players: scouts or stat guys?

A: Ninety-five percent scouts, five percent stats. The thing is that — with the exception of a very few players like Ryan Braun — college players are so far away from the major leagues that even the best of them will have to improve tremendously in order to survive as major league players — thus, the knowledge of who will improve is vastly more important than the knowledge of who is good. Stats can tell you who is good, but they’re almost 100 percent useless when it comes to who will improve.

In addition to that, college baseball is substantially different from pro baseball, because of the non-wooden bats and because of the scheduling of games. So … you have to pretty much let the scouts do that.