Black Hawk Waterloo was first introduced to sabermetrics at a very young age, when he bought a book on how to calculate baseball statistics at an elementary school book fair.  The book included “Production” (aka OPS), which he proceeded to calculate for himself throughout his Little League career.  A low-average, high-OBP player (hitting .000/.500/.000 one year, .200/.613/.267 another), BHW was what one might term a Moneyball All Star, had only Moneyball been written at that time.

In 1986, BHW’s parents bought him the APBA computer game for Christmas.  BHW was enthralled, and would continue playing the game for a decade.  This led him to have an irrational love for the hit-and-run play, which serves him well as an Angel fan.

BHW also had some kids’ science encyclopedia that had an entry explaining Pete Palmer’s Linear Weights, which influenced him greatly, and he was blown away by the original Total Baseball, released in 1989.  He spent many hours poring over its stats and their history, and soon became an avid reader of Bill James and the annual STATS Baseball Scoreboard.

At this juncture, BHW was a fan of both his local teams, the Angels and Dodgers, though as his favorite player was Wally Joyner he leaned more toward Anaheim.  He tired of the Dodgers in the early/mid-90s, as they were always stupidly ballyhooed by local media when they never really had a good team.  Well before the Angel Resurgence of 1995, he had become Angels-only.

BHW never made it as baseball player.  In his last season—a non-varsity summer league in high school—he did manage to hit .318 in 22 at bats, knocking in 10 runs in 12 games (including 4 in one inning).  Why he can’t remember his OBP is a mystery to him.

Back when BHW had a real name and was going to college at UCLA, he would often haunt alt.sports.baseball.calif-angels.  Stumbling into the group, he defended Gary DiSarcina.  Others argued with him, and BHW quickly returned to his sabermetric roots.  He would spend the next few years getting into arguments about DiSar, Alleged Prospect Justin Baughman, park factors, and the then-punchless Garret Anderson.

Immediately after college, BHW lost his internet connection for awhile, though asbc-a had become kinda boring, anyway.  BHW got a boring job that had internet access, and one day Rob Neyer linked to Baseball Primer.  Well, that solved the boredom problem.  After lurking awhile and only occasionally posting under his real initials, BHW stumbled across a lunatic site that used the phrase “Black Hawk Waterloo.” Amused to no end by that site’s insanity, he adopted it as his handle, which he uses to this day.

To further alleviate boredom, BHW maintains anaheimangelsblog.blogspot.com.  He works at a lousy job in the entertainment industry while pursuing a better career in that same industry on the side.  He spends most of his work time online, and much of that at Primer, so he every now and then gets slammed because the work doesn’t get itself done.

BHW is not convinced that Scott Spiezio’s World Series Game 6 went over the wall, and suspects he lives in a parallel universe designed to make him believe the Angels really did win.  He is so used to baseball being a sport of failure and humbling that he is a bit confused to see his team have success.  Confused, but happy.

Go Angels!