photo by: Journal-World file photo

In this file photo from May 2011, Bill James chats about his book "Popular Crime."

For Bill James, the calculus for continuing to live in Lawrence is simple: The city has all the comforts you could hope for and none of the congestion.

“Most other places where you can get the benefits of living in a place like Lawrence,” James said in a recent sit-down interview, “you also get the great benefit of spending an hour a day in traffic.”

James’ affinity for this place means that Kansas has for decades remained home to, by any metric, one of the most influential minds in baseball history. For the better part of 50 years, James has devoted himself to answering questions about the game, and done so primarily from Lawrence. The methods he has employed in doing so — essentially, his applied uses of eclectic statistics — have shaped the approaches of Major League Baseball front offices across the country, from Oakland, as documented in the book “Moneyball” and its film adaptation, to Boston, where he previously advised the Red Sox’s baseball operations department.

At the center of his work is a passion for the game that James will articulate, alongside his friend the former Kansas City Star, Sports Illustrated and The Athletic writer Joe Posnanski, as part of a panel titled “Why We Love Baseball” at the Kansas Book Festival on Saturday at Washburn University’s Memorial Union.

“I think that when people think of a book festival they think of, kind of, maybe highbrow literature,” said Kathleen Morgan, chair of the board of directors for the festival, “but the reality is a book festival is for everyone, and we wanted to make sure that there’s something for everyone.”

Brad Allen, the executive director of the Lawrence Public Library, added that audiences will benefit from “that blend of the two of them talking, the different ways that both of them look at it and the different experiences they have.”

Posnanski is currently touring in support of a recently released book called, appropriately, “Why We Love Baseball,” which enumerates memorable moments from the sport. James publishes annual baseball handbooks and will provide his own perspective.

James called Posnanski a “phenomenal writer,” “totally fearless” and remarked that he is utterly unencumbered by writer’s block (which James said he has spent about 60% to 70% of his own career dealing with).

“What he always says is, his dad worked in a factory,” James said. “His dad wouldn’t get up in the morning and say, ‘I don’t feel like I can work in the factory today.’ He’d just get up and he’d do it. That’s the way he is.”

September is an interesting juncture for James to speak at a literary event, because he is currently in the process of winding down his longtime website, Bill James Online, in favor of writing additional books.

He said he won’t miss the website’s outdated technology that makes actually posting on it a struggle (“You feel like somewhere between you and your audience there’s an old dial-up modem”), but he has enjoyed creating a dialogue with his readers.

“We formed a group of people who understand what I’m doing,” James said, “who you can skip the first few paragraphs of every article because they know what you’re doing and who ask good questions, and the main thing I’ve enjoyed is fielding the questions and responding to them.”

Apart from the endless torrent of queries he’s addressed (of which he has a “20-year backlog”), James’ print writing has taken disparate directions in recent years, beyond annual handbooks and essay collections about baseball to various works on true crime.

James says he wants to update his comprehensive Historical Baseball Abstract “before I get too old” but otherwise keeps future book plans close to his chest: “But I have 20 other books I’d like to write.”

He said he also wants to speak with Posnanski, who currently blogs on Substack, about alternative ways to reach readers when his website is gone.

The pair will have plenty more to discuss when it comes to the game itself.

“I’ll be curious to see kind of how they’re feeling about baseball and its recent transformations,” Allen said.

MLB is in the home stretch of its first season under fairly consequential new rules, including restrictions on defensive shifts and a pitch clock that forces pitchers to start delivering pitches within 15 seconds and batters to enter the box within eight.

James said that hitters stepping out of the box “constantly slowed the pace of the action down to such a point that it took a lot away from the audience” and that he would have eliminated the ability to call time altogether, if not for the expected resistance from players.

In general, James said that baseball rules have been characterized by “irrational resistance to adjustments” since the backlash to the implementation of the designated hitter in 1973.

“It terrified the authorities that be, and then within a few years, also, the players’ union,” he said. “The players’ union negotiated the right to sign off on rules changes. And the combination of those two things stopped adjustments to the rules. That stopped the process of policing the rules. Nobody’s trying to use the rules to change the game, they’re using the rules to stop it from changing.”

He argues that throughout the history of baseball, managers and players have led the way in changing on-field strategy, while administrators have taken a hands-off approach to keeping the game watchable all the while — until now.

“So finally, we reached the point where the commissioner’s office is saying, ‘Stop that. It’s annoying,'” he said. “And that will help immensely going forward. Yes, there will be changes I’d like to see that we can’t do because of this or that. But we’ve broken through that barrier that was holding us back.”

Next up, he said something needs to be done about the proliferation of strikeouts, which are “swallowing up the game,” but he’s not sure what. James has in recent years argued for a limit on the number of pitches batters can foul off to avoid striking out, which would speed up the game. He contends that hitters would adapt their swings and change their approaches, which in the long term would decrease strikeouts.

“But that would take three or four years for that to happen,” he said. “In the meantime, strikeouts would explode, so nobody wants to go through that.”

James will continue to grapple with questions like these, even if it’s not, as it has been for the last 15-plus years, on his website. Most immediately, he will field inquiries from attendees at Washburn on Saturday.