I asked James a question I’ve been asking lots of people: What are the three things that he’s saddest to have lost? “The NCAA tournament,” he said, without missing a beat. “My Jayhawks were the consensus No. 1 team.” After that he mourned the delay to the start of the baseball season. “That’s going to tear a huge hole in my daily life.” He rattled off the years that MLB’s season was shortened, by war or strike: 1918, 1919, 1972, 1981, 1994, 1995. A few days earlier he’d put a poll up on Twitter, asking people to predict this year’s Opening Day. He had his own prediction: May 15. More than a thousand people took his poll. All but one thought he was being wildly optimistic.
James has no privileged information about the virus. He reads the news like everyone else. “It’s hard to distinguish between what is being said responsibly and what’s just being said,” he told me. But he also has a history of looking at data and deciding to think one thing, even when everyone else is thinking another, and being proved right.
“I have four reasons for thinking what I think,” he said. First, warm weather might deaden the virus’s spread. Second, the global medical research community might prove surprisingly resourceful. “I believe we will find medicine that will combat this more quickly than most people seem to believe,” he said. “I think most people have the sense not to pay attention to the rules that don’t make sense to pay attention to, and so doctors will be doing more freelancing and we’re going to start hearing people say, ‘I’ve got a medicine that works.’”
Third, he thought that the country with the best testing data had the most accurate view of the disease. And that it was possible that a huge number of Americans have it now, or have had it, without really knowing it. “If 30% of the population has already been exposed to this then that number will go to 70% in two weeks,” James said. Assuming that having the disease left you with immunity to it, the crisis would then be as good as over, and baseball could begin.
“What’s the fourth reason to your argument?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “There’s another reason, but being an old person I can’t remember what it was.”
“What’s the third thing you are saddest about having lost?” I asked.
“I had a goal of going to lunch with a friend 100 times this year. That’s not going to happen.”
I said goodbye to Bill James and checked our local news site. Berkeleyside, it is called, and it is suddenly the go-to place for the news that matters most. An hour earlier, the site reported, an 80-year-old Berkeley man had tested positive for the virus. His girlfriend (!) said that the man hadn’t gone anywhere for a long time. But he had, a few days earlier, shopped for his groceries at our local Safeway.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.