Sabermetrician

Sabermetrics is the empirical analysis of baseball, especially baseball statistics that measure in-game activity. Sabermetricians collect and summarize the relevant data from this in-game activity to answer specific questions. The term is derived from the acronym SABR, which stands for the Society for American Baseball Research, founded in 1971. The term sabermetrics was coined by Bill James, who is one of its pioneers and is often considered its most prominent advocate and public face.

Henry Chadwick, a sportswriter in New York, developed the boxscore in 1858. This was the first way statisticians were able to describe the sport of baseball. The creation of the boxscore has given baseball statisticians a summary of the individual and team performances for a given game.David Smith founded Retrosheet in 1989, with the objective of computerizing the box score of every major league baseball game ever played, in order to more accurately collect and compare the statistics of the game.

Sabermetrics research began in the middle of the 20th century. Earnshaw Cook was one of the earliest researchers that contributed to this idea. Cook gathered the majority of his research into his 1964 book, Percentage Baseball. The book was the first of its kind to gain national media attention, although it was widely criticized and not accepted by most baseball organizations. The idea of advanced baseball statistics did not become prominent in the baseball community until Bill James began writing his annual Baseball Abstracts in 1977.

Bill James believed that people misunderstood how the game of baseball was played, claiming that it is actually defined by the conditions under which the sport is played. Sabermetricians, sometimes considered baseball statisticians, began trying to replace the longtime favorite statistic known as the batting average. It has been claimed that team batting average provides a relatively poor fit for team runs scored. Sabermetric reasoning would say that runs win ballgames, and that a good measure of a player's worth is his ability to help his team score more runs than the opposing team.

Before Bill James was able to bring the concept of sabermetrics to known topic, Davey Johnson used an IBM System/360 at team owner Jerold Hoffberger's brewery to write a FORTRAN baseball computer simulation while playing for the Baltimore Orioles in the early 1970s. He unsuccessfully used his results in an attempt to propose the idea that he should bat second in the lineup to his manager Earl Weaver. He wrote IBM BASIC programs to help him manage the Tidewater Tides, and after becoming manager of the New York Mets in 1984, he arranged for a team employee to write a dBASE II application to compile and store advanced metrics on team statistics.Craig R. Wright was another employee in Major League Baseball, working with the Texas Rangers in the early 1980s. During his time with the Rangers, he became known as the first front office employee in MLB history to work under the title Sabermetrician.

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