Earnshaw Cook

Earnshaw Cook (March 28, 1900 in Reisterstown, Maryland – November 11, 1987 in Baltimore, Maryland) was an early researcher and proponent of sabermetrics, the analysis of baseball through statistical means.

A member of the Princeton University class of 1921, Cook was an engineer specializing in metallurgy. He spent most of his working life at the American Brake Shoe Co. in Mahwah, New Jersey, later consulting on the Manhattan Project before retiring from the industry 1945. In the 1950s and 1960s, Cook worked as a mechanical engineering professor at Johns Hopkins University, where he published several academic papers.

Cook first set about his statistical baseball studies with the goal of proving that Ty Cobb, holder of the highest career batting average at .366, was better than Babe Ruth, the premier power hitter of the first half of the 20th century. Additionally Cook sought to understand strategical issues such as batting order and relief pitching, rather than accept the traditional strategies of baseball.Sports Illustrated writer Frank Deford learned of Cook's work and interviewed him for the lead story of a 1964 issue with the title "Baseball is Played All Wrong". Using tools of the time, such as a slide rule and a Friden STW mechanical calculator, Earnshaw Cook published the culmination of his work, Percentage Baseball (MIT Press), in 1964.Percentage Baseball was the first book of baseball statistics studies to gain national media attention. Though Cook received some support from Los Angeles Dodgers manager Walter Alston and Chicago White Sox owner Bill Veeck, most baseball executives and managers rejected Cook's mathematical approach and academic language. He was also criticized for lax mathematical models and inadequate numerical evidence by statisticians, such as George Lindsey (himself a baseball statistician), who advised that it be "kept out of the sight of students of the theory of probability." Modern author Michael Lewis describes Cook's prose as "crafted to alienate [baseball statistics] converts."

...
Wikipedia