Personal: Father & Mother (self-explanatory), Grandfather (physicist who taught me the value of science and math), college/law school professors Professor Hallisey (helping me understand the necessity of empathy in academia) and Professor Freyfogle (showing me how powerful and important land and the environment can be), best friend (his compassion and inner strength)

Literary/Academic/Other: Terry Pratchett (even Death can be funny), Edward Abbey (progress isn’t always a good thing), Robert Penn Warren (it is impossible to merely be an observer in life), filmmakers Alfred Hitchcock, Jean-Pierre Melville, and Fritz Lang (the beauty of film), Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason melted my brain), a smattering of religious figures/icons (Jesus, Mahavira, Buddha), and, finishing up with baseball, Harry Caray and Ron Santo (the joy of baseball and the pain of being a Cubs fan)

Poets: William Blake, Wallace Stevens, Emily Dickinson, Ezra Pound & Charles Olson have most influenced how I think about culture, being, beauty, history and identity.

Aesthetics: I think Hitchcock’s interviews w/ Traffaut, which I read while at community college, have become my basic intuitions concerning what makes for good art.

Faulkner: The past is not gone, it is not even the past.

Music: Nick Tosches, Greil Marcus, Bob Dylan & Johnny Cash, for how the deep, weird history of the nation can bubble up in any song.

Philosophy: Alfred North Whitehead, William James, Henri Bergson, Martin Heidegger & Friedrich Nietzsche: force and flux as the keys to the cosmos.

Sports: Bill James. When you think you know the answer, start asking better, smarter questions.

Culture & politics: Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze: there’s a little fascist inside each of us with which we must cope.

You know, I think the evolution of how a person views baseball changes so quickly these days, especially as you get older.

My own views of the game have changed dramatically in the last two years.

Bill James and Dave Cameron most recently perhaps. And I think I’m lucky that I am a Mariners fan that the pipeline to sabermetrics runs right there with Tom Tango.

I think it’s funny to think how much the game is evolving in the last decade and then you remember that relatively the game is young. MLB is young. The modern era is just a baby.

And I think about how the game will be viewed in 5 years. 10 years. 50 years.

I think people will laugh about some of the things we believe about the game now. We’ve had thousands of years to perfect science and science is far from perfect. We are still in the “Earth is flat” stage of understanding baseball.

I wonder if prospects will bust in 50 years because some young genius will crack some code about what makes someone good or bad. And then 50 years after that someone else will change the game.

Who influenced my view on baseball? Too many people to count and far less than what the final number will be.

Personal: Mom, my first real girlfriend Anya, my first boss Marty

Others: Noam Chomsky for both linguistics and politics, Jorge Luis Borges, Robert Pirsig, Kristof Kieslowski, Howard Zinn

Frederic Bastiat
Bob Dylan
Thomas Jefferson
Ludwig von Mises
Murray Rothbard
Laurence Sterne

Bart Giamatti wrote one of the more important essays on baseball of recent time in ‘The Green Fields of the Mind’.

Further back, I’m particularly partial to Updike’s ‘Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu’ and Joshua Prager’s ‘The Echoing Green’.

My grandfather was the biggest influence on how I have approached life. He was a “Son of Bitche” (100th ID) during WW2, drove a truck and a taxi, managed a King’s department store and did a handful of other jobs to support a wife and two daughters, both of whom he paid to go to expensive colleges. He told me to embrace life, pursue my goals, and remember to stay close to my family. He also formed my notions of romance and adventure. He married my grandmother in an era where catholics and Jews didn’t intermarry, and as she was dying of cancer in her 60s he finally converted (circumcision and everything), so they would be able to be burried together. He lived the last 20 years alone, but always had good friends around him. He would drive 2-3 hours just to go for lunch at a diner he once visited years before.

My folks both work/worked in standard 8-5 jobs with either big companies or government my whole life, and have always had enough to pay the bills and support the family, but I always wanted more. Even though I was academically gifted I never cared for school, only barely getting a degree out of necessity, and have worked in sales ever since. When I was 14 I was in the Boy Scouts selling Christmas Wreaths. I discovered that I could, thanks to sales, have what I wanted (in this case an extra week away during the summer). That lesson stuck with me and I have always been in sales since. The idea that you can control your own performance and earnings in this business, far more then in any other, has shaped much of my adult life.

Politically I like to tell people I’m a Libertarian, but not in the Ron Paul whackjob sense. I’m a fan of small government, but feel it does have a role in a functioning democracy. I know he wasn’t perfect, but I was always a big fan of Arlen Specter.

I’m a regular reader and poster on overlawyered, and feel like the ATLA (AAJ) has caused a lot more problems then they have solved.

There is a line in an old Don Williams http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZxD3W7YL24 song that sticks with me… “Those Williams boys they still mean a lot to me,, Hank and Tennessee”

http://www.desiringgod.org/

Tremendous Biblically-sound doctrine, largely following in the footsteps of John Calvin and Jonathan Edwards. Worth your time to check out.

John Dewey, David Hume (great call, John!), Charles Darwin, Steven Pinker, Daniel Dennett, Fyodor Dostoevsky, John Searle, John Rawls, and Christopher Hitchens (though we disagree on a few things!).

Dante Alighieri is first without a doubt. The Divine Comedy is one of the most influential books of all time that many people have never heard about

Bill James and Peter Gammons for Baseball

Joseph Stiglitz for Developmental Economics. Can’t get enough of this guy

My dad taught me how to be a decent human being and instilled intellectual curiosity

My college Philosophy of Religion professor taught me the right questions to ask (and the wrong ones)

I was 14 when I read it, and before reading it, I took everything I heard on TV or the radio to be the truth. Moneyball taught me to question “experts”, and everything really.

David Hume, Pasqual, and Jim from The Office, among others also influence me.

Herbert Marcuse, Hannah Arendt, Eduard Bernstein, and Noam Chomsky.

For baseball, two people simultaneously shaped the way I viewed the game … my mother, and a radio sportscaster in Seattle named Leo Lassen. My mother was a huge fan of the Seattle Rainiers (our home team), and, to a somewhat lesser degree, the Brooklyn Dodgers. (She always rooted for the underdog). She taught me to keep score as together we listened to nearly every game on radio. In my recollection, I don’t ever recall her attending one in person. Leo Lassen was the best radio broadcaster I ever heard, before or since. Yes, better than Vin Scully, Earnie Harwell, Mel Allen … all the greats. He had a voice like a cold north wind screeching over a row of rusty bathtubs … but the way he described the game made his sound beautiful to us. Leo was also one of the great “recreation” artists … who created the game broadcast by reading an abbreviated teletype message. Some of our family’s greatest times were listening when Leo had to stall because the teletype stopped working for awhile … He never let on what had happened, and it was only from years of listening to every game on the radio that we finally figured out what was happening. He was priceless, and greatly increased my understanding and love of the game. Leo and my Mom. God, I have tears in my eyes.

sorry, couldn’t help myself.

I read a book or two of Vonnegut’s every year. I’m reading God Bless You Mr. Rosewater right now. As I grow older, I am not sure about all of his conclusions, but I think that he has good intentions and a lot of what he is trying to impart is heartfelt and true.

I also like Alan Moore a lot. Alan Moore is almost certainly batschmidt crazy though at this point. Still, really brilliant at times. If someone is going to be batschmidt crazy, Mr. Moore’s way is the way to do it.

Clarence Darrow
Thaddeus Stevens
John Rawls, by extension (I’ve never actually read his books, but just about every philosophical argument I agree with is built from them)

that dovetail inevitably into baseball.
Authors: L. Frank Baum, JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis, Ray Bradbury, Howard Zinn, Mark Twain
Playwrights: Sean O’Casey, Shakespeare, Sam Shephard, David Mamet, David Henry Hwang
Poets: William Butler Yeats, Seamus Heaney, TS Eliot, Dr. Seuss, Robert Frost, Wilfred Owen
Directors: Akira Kurosawa, Stanley Kubrick
Musicians: Neil Young, Richard Thompson, Neil Peart
Baseball Influences: The Natural, Mizuno, Yaz, Don Sutton on a 7-11 Slurpee Cup, Jeff Burroughs model Louisville Slugger Little League Bat, Drew Middleton.

Capt. John Yossarian
and Abe Lincoln

My grandfather, Justice Cardozzo, Justice Scalia, Judge Learned Hand, Moneyball.

…the guy who pumps my gas.

Omar Little.

My list:

I am a Soto Zen Buddhist, so: Siddhārtha Gautama (Buddha), Dogen Zenji, Shunryu Suzuki, and Brad Warner.

Political/Philosophical: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr., Karl Marx, Saul Alinsky, William Domhoff, Buddhadasa Bhikkhu, Bernie Sanders

Others: Muhammad Yunus, Bill James, George Carlin, Prof. Norman Krumholz, Dr. Lauren Eastwood

I am sure I am forgetting some….but to be expected with such a list.

dad, my older brother, my mom. My first grade teacher Mrs. Duchovany (David Duchovany’s mom), my 8th grade math/English teacher, Mrs. Collet, and 6th grade math teacher Mrs. Henry.

spiritual: my best friend’s guru Pamela Wilson, Buddah

authors: Tolkien, E.B. White, CS Lewis, Twain, R.A. Salvatore, Hickman and Weis, Raymond E. Feist, Octavia Butler.

Artists: Michelangelo

movies: Bruce Lee

music: Simon and Garfunkel (as a duo)

baseball wise: While my bro got me into watching and enjoying the game….
 I agree, John Sickels also opened my eyes at being a “better” fan and understanding stats. I used to just enjoy minor leagues on a casual basis, but he got me into loving the “youth movement”. I even follow college ball to some degree thanks to John.

self-motivation: Zig Ziglar, Tony Robbins. yep they work.

A quick search shows no one else mentioning him, but he is an intellectual giant in two very important fields: evolution, and in particular evolutionary psychology; and antitheism. And for a bonus, he also “invented” the concept of memes.

Others include Thomas Jefferson, Robert Wright, Bastiat and the other Austrians (Mises, Hayek, etc), Stuart Kauffman (an obscure chaos theory scientist), Rush (in my teens, obviously), Robert Higgs (an outstanding libertarian/Austrian thinker/writer), Tolkien (ok, not really a “thinker”, but he influenced me in the sense of teaching me that we have to have “fantasies”), and way too many others.

Most of the comments have already gone over a lot of my intellectual influences- I’ll add Shel Silverstein (his books opened my brain as a child), John Waters (my father owned a video store- probably shouldn’t have shown his son Pink Flamingos at like 7 years old), Edgar Allen Poe (love darkness in lit), Albert Einstein (mostly his thought of time, which I still practice to this day- read Einstien’s Dreams. Great book), Picasso for Guernica, Monet, Degas, Dali, My great grandmother and many others that formed my thoughts on things.

The main reason I’m posting though is I’ve been an avid reader of John’s for as long as I’ve been online and between his writing on prospects (opened my eyes to the stats v. scouting world), the commenters on this particular site are the best on the web. Period. There isn’t anywhere else where such intelligent debate and intelligent people who ACTUALLY see the people they are talking about and post. A true rarity. You should all commend yourselves!

As for baseball- Paul DePodesta (in Moneyball), John, Peter Gammons (many moons ago), Joe Sheehan (TINSTAAPP), Joe Posnanski, Bubs (a Cali dude who ran a baseball card shop, dressed in a sarong, had women of the night over and invented dice baseball), Ralph Kiner (I’m a long suffereing, butt of many jokes Mets fan) and my grandfather.

Thank you guys and keep up the great work!

Bertrand Russel, Jonathan Swift, Fydor Dostoyevsky, Edith Wharton, Voltaire, Edmund Husserl, John Maynard Keynes, Milton Friedman, Knut Wicksell, Paul Krugman, Alexis de Tocqueville, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Pain, Ben Franklin, Mark Twain, Bob Dylan, Woody Allen, Aldous Huxley, DH Lawrence, Harper Lee, Ernest Hemingway, Jimmy Breslin, Murray Kempton, ee cummings, James Thurber, John Lennon, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Ludwig van Beethoven, Howard Zinn, John Sayles, John Ford, John Steinbeck, Emmanuel Lasker, Paul Cezanne, Warren Buffet, Benjamin Graham, Alfred Adler, Dale Carnegie, Stephen Colbert, Linus Pauling, Guido van Rossum.