Influential Statistician Bill James Announces He's Leaving Position With Red Sox After 17 Years

Before there was Theo Epstein or Billy Beane, there was Bill James.

The father of Sabermetrics, James' work in the Baseball Abstract in the 1980s helped define many of the niche, effective and exploitable statistics that so many modern baseball teams rely on to find success at the margins.

And, whether you knew it or not, James has plied his trade and sold his expertise to the Boston Red Sox for the past 17 years, a chunk of time that includes...well, every single modern Red Sox title.

Now, at the age of 70, James is leaving his post after a few years of hemming and hawing, on the "best possible terms."

As James eloquently wrote in his goodbye message on billjamesonline.com, "I am still friendly with everyone that I have worked with there, from the owners to the security guards.  I still intend to pay the extortionary rates of DirecTV’s baseball package so that I can watch every Red Sox game.  Well, maybe not EVERY game; retirement means I don’t have to stay up to watch them play a four-hour game in Seattle ending at 1:30.  In exchange for that, next time we win the World Series, I won’t get a ring."

As James said, he's by no means retiring, and will still be writing and completing his catalogue as the years pile on.

We may never know exactly how much influence James had on the modern Red Sox front office, but winning correlated directly with his arrival. We'll let you fill in the blanks.