The house is simple white, with wood siding, cobalt blue trim, and a clue that gives Bill James away -- resting atop a cobblestone pillar, an oversized baseball.
Perhaps it's fitting that the most mysterious member of the Red Sox' front office works at this mystery address in Lawrence, Kan., a quiet college town some 1,470 miles from 4 Yawkey Way.
The godfather of modern baseball statistical analysis, James is among a growing number of sabermetricians (a term he coined) being hired publicly by major league teams. The 56-year-old broke onto the scene with his revolutionary ''Baseball Abstract" in 1977, a book he produced annually for 12 years.
His ideas have been lauded and laughed at, excoriated and extolled, but here in this small, Midwestern world, James listens to none of it -- the bad or the good. He just works. The house-turned-office is simple. A few prints hang randomly on the walls and some baseball memorabilia lines the mantle. Homemade bookshelves constructed of raw boards resting on stacks of bricks stretch from floor to ceiling and trace the walls of James's office. Boxes are strewn about the floor, an old computer monitor sits abandoned on a table, and papers cover the desk -- it's five rooms filled with a lifetime of obsession.
The humble little house didn't always sparkle.
According to James's wife, Susan McCarthy, a tall, slender redhead who works from home as an artist, the place was in such bad shape a few years ago that the insurance company refused to cover it unless they fixed it up.
''It really did look bad. It just needed to be painted and the yard looked terrible," she recalls, sitting in the much more stately living room of the James's massive, vintage Victorian home on Ohio Street, just a few blocks from the office. ''Bill was supposed to be taking care of getting someone to mow, and he let months go by. He just doesn't like to take care of stuff like that."
What James does like to take care of are numbers, at least some of them.
