Bill James, the iconoclastic baseball thinker, is leaving the Red Sox organization after 17 years. James's job was described by the team as working "with senior management and the baseball operations department to provide research and analysis of special projects, and on-going concerns".
James was one of the first people hired by John Henry's ownership group, in November 2002. At the time, Henry, a big fan of James's Baseball Abstracts from the 1980s, said: "I don't understand how it took this long for somebody to hire this guy".
Less than two years later, Boston was celebrating its first World Series championship since 1918.