A few years ago, Bill James was in a Boston hotel room, relaxing with a book about one of the city’s most accomplished yet least admired sons: the Boston Strangler. There are numerous accounts of the killer’s grisly 1960s spree—which left at least 14 women dead—and James has read a lot of them, possibly all of them. But this particular book stood out, mostly because the author’s research was sloppy. James kept finding mistakes. In one case, even the location of one of the murders was wrong. “The guy really irritated me,” James says.

James lives in Lawrence, Kansas, but he spends quite a bit of time in Boston, where he’s worked for the Red Sox since 2002. Technically, he’s the team’s senior adviser of baseball operations, using his deep statistical knowledge of the game to help the Sox develop strategy and decide which players to sign. But it would be a mistake to think of James as a mere number cruncher. What he really does is study baseball—its history, its dynamics, its laws—and ask questions: What’s the best way to use a relief pitcher? How important is a bunt? Usually, these are questions that have been put forth numerous times before and seemingly resolved. But James keeps asking them anyway. In the process, he has become one of the most celebrated analysts in the sport’s history, with more than a dozen books to his name, many of them considered indispensable.

In addition to wondering about slugging percentages and pitching records, though, James has long been asking questions like: Why do some crimes become more famous than others? How reliable are eyewitness descriptions? Was the real Boston Strangler caught? Which is why his latest compendium of knowledge isn’t about baseball; it’s about murder. Called Popular Crime, it’s an omnibus of serial killers, kidnappers, assassins, and the occasional terrorist. Most of James’ research is drawn from his mammoth library of true-crime books. And after reading extensively about the Boston Strangler, he started to second-guess the supposed experts—the cops, the lawyers, the authors.

What if, James wondered, the police had arrested the wrong man? What if some key pattern to the murders had been overlooked? In the months after he first started thinking about that one book’s errors, he repeatedly found himself running into some of the Strangler’s old haunts and eventually decided to map out the crimes. In the end, James came up with his own theory as to what happened, which raises a question: Can a guy who changed the way we look at baseball transform the way we think about crime?

Even if you barely follow baseball—even if your greatest relationship to the game was, say, a childhood obsession with the 1980s Phillies, one that was cut short by an unpleasant encounter with a certain slugger who had a bowl-mullet haircut and a gambling problem—well, even then, you’ve probably heard of Bill James. He’s appeared on The Simpsons and 60 Minutes and played a prominent role in the Michael Lewis best-seller Moneyball. His fan base has included everyone from the late Norman Mailer to New York Times numbers whiz Nate Silver.

James’ wise-beard status can be traced to a series of self-published books he wrote in the late ’70s while working at a Kansas pork-and-beans factory. Each carried the name Baseball Abstract and contained a mix of dust-dry stats and nimble prose that James used to debunk some of the sport’s most deeply held beliefs. Every volume was a synaptic strand of heresy, laying out one controversial idea after another: Sacrifice bunts are often counterproductive; saving relief pitchers for the last inning is a waste; a player’s offensive strength can be measured not by batting average but by something called Runs Created, a complex formula that looks like it belongs on the back of an algebra flash card. James eventually dubbed his DIY science Sabermetrics (after Society for American Baseball Research, a private organization that tracks baseball stats), and while some fans embraced it right away, others viewed him as a meddling nerd.

“He challenged a lot of received wisdom,” says Daniel Okrent, founder of rotisserie baseball, who wrote a profile on James for Sports Illustrated that appeared in May 1981 (the piece was so contentious, the magazine held it for a year). “There was resistance among the baseball establishment. I remember manager Sparky Anderson saying, ‘What do I care about some little guy with glasses and an adding machine?’ And first of all, Bill’s twice the size of Sparky. But you heard a great deal of that kind of thing.”

James approached baseball with the wide-eyed vigor of a fan and the clear-eyed rigor of a logician. In 1982, he wrote his own article for Sports Illustrated, challenging the value of stolen bases. Titled “So What’s All the Fuss?” the piece put forth the notion that stolen bases are “trendy trinkets” that don’t help teams win games—a conclusion James drew after exploring an exhausting number of questions. He began with a broad query: Do base-stealing teams win? From there, he conducted an inquest of all the data he could get: How many bases are stolen in wins, and how many are stolen in losses? If a runner steals second, what are the odds he’ll end up scoring a run? How often does a base-stealer lead the league in runs scored? “I try to take large, general questions that are difficult to resolve and break them down into small, very specific questions that have clear answers,” James says.

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