How did Sports Illustrated help make Bill James famous?

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Green retro manual baseball scoreboard beyond an empty, neatly mowed baseball field with brown infield dirt and striped grass outfield. — Sabermetrics A scoreboard provides some – but not necessarily the most useful – data on player and team performances in baseball.

Sports Illustrated played a pivotal role in Bill James's rise to prominence by publishing a profile on him, which helped bring his work to a wider audience. Following this exposure, the first mass-marketed edition of his Baseball Abstract was released in bookstores in 1982.1

Prior to this, James had been self-publishing his Baseball Abstracts since 1977, conducting original studies using data from The Baseball Encyclopedia and box scores. His work, which introduced influential concepts such as runs created and Pythagorean winning percentage, eventually transformed the field of sabermetrics.12