“[Bill] James's first proper essay was the preview to an astonishing literary career. There was but one question he left unasked, and it vibrated between his lines: if gross miscalculations of a person's value could occur on a baseball field, before a live audience of thirty thousand, and a television audience of millions more, what did that say about the measurements of performance in other lines of work? If professional baseball players could be over- and under-valued, who couldn't? Bad as they may have been, the statistics used to evaluate baseball players were probably far more accurate than anything used to measure the value of people who didn't play baseball for a living.”

--Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, pg. 72. The movie, starring Brad Pitt, and which has been getting astonishingly good reviews (“Has to be described as an example of what Hollywood does best” - Andrew O'Hehir; “...in its own quiet, unspectacular way, this movie courses with life” - Dana Stevens), opens tomorrow.