Voros McCracken
| Voros McCracken | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Robert McCracken August 17, 1971 Chicago, Illinois, U.S. |
| Residence | Phoenix, Arizona, U.S. |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Sports statistician, sabermetrician |
| Known for | Defense independent pitching statistics |
| Website | Official website |
Robert "Voros" McCracken (born August 17, 1971, Chicago) is an American baseball sabermetrician. "Voros" is a nickname from his partial Hungarian heritage. He is widely recognized for his pioneering work on Defense Independent Pitching Statistics (DIPS).
McCracken first published his ideas about DIPS in 1999 on the rec.sports.baseball newsgroup on Usenet. He also effectively named the new concept of "defense independent pitching" with that publication: "I've been working on a pitching evaluation tool and thought I'd post it here to get some feedback. I call it 'Defensive Independent Pitching' and what it does is evaluate a pitcher base[d] strictly on the statistics his defense has no ability to affect...".
His findings implied that major league pitchers had little control over the outcome of balls put into play against them and specifically that the percentage of balls put into play against a particular pitcher that fell for hits did not correlate across seasons. This implied that elements beyond the pitcher's control, including defense, ballpark, weather and randomness, had significant effects upon his performance.
McCracken's "Pitchers and Defense: How Much Control Do Hurlers Have?" was published on the Baseball Prospectus website in 2001 and was picked up on by baseball researchers and ESPN baseball writer and analyst Rob Neyer. After explaining McCracken's findings, including reporting some of his own calculations from the previous years' pitching statistics and describing the aspects of DIPS that were most original, Neyer concluded: "And it seems to me that anyone who wants to project pitcher performance should read McCracken's article, because it'll blow your mind." In his book The Numbers Game, Alan Schwarz writes that McCracken told him “all hell broke loose” after Neyer's column appeared. He received nearly 2,000 emails in the next couple of days and thousands more in the ensuing months.
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Wikipedia