A month or so ago when the Boston Red Sox were celebrating their World Series championship on the Busch Stadium turf, I couldn’t help but think of Bill James.

As the Sox jubilantly exorcised the Curse of the Bambino, I wondered if James had the slightest notion three decades ago when he was working as a night watchman at the old Stokely-Van Camp bean plant in East Lawrence that one day he would have his very own World Series ring.

I tried to reach James after the Series, but he fell so far behind in answering phone calls that I wasn’t able to contact him until Monday.

“No,” he replied, confirming my suspicions, “I never expected to have (a ring).”

If you don’t know the James story, here’s a capsule: While he was guarding those beans, James took a different look at baseball statistics and eventually published his ideas in what he called “The Baseball Abstract.”

What began as a mimeographed sheet turned into a national publication. Then James published a lengthier examination of baseball in the hardbound “Baseball Historical Abstract” and he became the country’s best known practitioner of baseball sabermetrics.

Most baseball people debunked James’ theories. Then a few years ago the Red Sox hired him and bestowed him with the lofty title of Senior Baseball Operations Advisor. He didn’t move to Boston, buy a three-piece suit and join the establishment. James still lives in Lawrence, where he easily can advise Boston GM Theo Epstein either via phone or e-mail.

Epstein will ask for James’ reaction to possible player moves, analysis of players available to fill a hole on the roster or opinions about potential trades. Epstein will not ask him about the irony of working for both a bean factory and a Beantown baseball team.

If you’re familiar with James’ theories, they lean heavily upon on-base percentage, run production, range factor and win shares. Most of the players on the Red Sox roster fit into the high end of those theories, but not all. For instance, leadoff hitter Johnny Damon doesn’t usually have a high on-base percentage, yet he scores a lot of runs.

What struck me most about the Red Sox’s run to their improbable World Championship, however, was the X-factor. All the win shares in the world won’t enable a team to come back from a 3-0 deficit in the AL Championship Series, then sweep a World Series.

Any sports team that can accomplish that feat must also exist on an invisible stratum measured by what ticks inside a player’s head and what throbs inside his heart. James concedes as much.

“I don’t know what, specifically, the amazing turnaround against the Yankees proved,” he said. “I will say this: The Red Sox had fantastic veteran leadership.”

We could not see that veteran leadership on television. We knew the Red Sox only as men wearing the distinctive uniform of the baseball player and, in essence, all baseball players look pretty much alike. Yet James knows more about those men than their numbers. He knows their mental makeup.

“(Curt) Schilling personified courage and determination,” James said. “(Kevin) Millar, who is always positive, always thinks the team is on the brink of victory, no matter what.”

Schilling and Millar aren’t the only ones.

“We have Jason Varitek, who is focused and intense and serious,” James continued. “We have Keith Foulke, who is calm and quiet, but VERY confident and extremely poised. And we have David Ortiz, who doesn’t get the same credit for leadership, but who is as positive as Millar, as confident as Foulke, as focused as Varitek and as determined as Schilling.

“I don’t think there is any way in the world we would have come back from that 3-0 deficit without this really unusual leadership cadre.”

Now that the Series is over and James is back burrowing into his passion for statistics and their interpretation, you might spot him at one of his favorite places while the Hot Stove League is in session — Allen Fieldhouse.

Like many others, James has learned the new points system for priority seating has given him a different, non-sabermetric perspective on Kansas University men’s basketball.

“I still have tickets, and they’re ALMOST in the fieldhouse,” he said. “There’s a row number on them and everything.”