Loose Lemur.(The Talk of the Town)

Bill James, the Boston Red Sox senior adviser and resident skeptic, made his name by using statistics to debunk many of baseball's truisms--by showing that much of what we think we see on a ball field turns out to be little more than an illusion when held up to the light of evidence. Then, after the Red Sox won their first World Series in eighty-six years, breaking Babe Ruth's supposed "curse," James published an essay, "Underestimating the Fog," in which he seemed to backpedal on some crucial points. He suggested, for instance, that clutch hitting--long since dismissed by Jamesian rationalists as a myth--might exist after all, and that his colleagues just weren't looking hard enough. Diehards in the statistician community wondered if James hadn't gone soft with age, and begun seeing ghosts.

Several weeks ago, James was walking home from Fenway Park, after a Red Sox victory over the Kansas City Royals, when he came across a strange-looking animal with a speckled gray head. He at first took it to be a cat, but soon noticed a number of peculiar characteristics: the animal had large eyes on the sides of its head, a puglike face, and an extra-long tail ("like a broom handle"), and it moved with "an odd sashaying motion." The moon was full. James was alone on the street. He stared at the animal for, as he later recalled, "a length of time which is probably six or seven times as long as the period that a fly ball is in the air." The animal scurried under a parked car, at one point seeming to lift its hind legs over a stick in the road by using its tail as a kind of lever.

James quickly dispensed with the obvious candidates--dog, squirrel, raccoon, rat, skunk, possum--and began working his way down a checklist of more exotic possibilities: sloth, bear, porcupine, beaver. By the time he reached his house, he had decided that the animal he saw must have been a lemur. Lemurs are primates native to Madagascar, and by all available evidence, he realized, this was unlikely; the odds of stumbling upon a lemur living on the streets of a northeastern metropolis are a little like the odds of a baseball team's going eighty-six years without a championship because of a curse. James says he called the local animal-control center, which informed him that his was the first Boston lemur sighting on record. (The Franklin Park Zoo, in ...