“Baseball Analyst” Archives Now Available At SABR.org

Now if they’ll just run those Cerrone-published Bill James bits from Baseball Magazine...

“Baseball Analyst”, a Bill James creation that he self-published from 1982 to 1989, was one of the first publications to feature articles devoted to sabermetrics — a phrase he coined in part to honor SABR. “Baseball Analyst” was a 20-page magazine compiled for most of those years by Bill and his wife, Susan McCarthy, at home in Kansas and sent out to dozens (later a hundred or so) of subscribers who paid $12 a year for the privilege.

From the beginning, its content was groundbreaking: The first article in the first issue of June 1982 was by Paul Schwarzenbart on ballpark effects, now a widely accepted idea in baseball analysis. In Issue 8 of October 1983, “Baseball Analyst” announced the creation of Project Scoresheet — started because there was no easy way to find box scores or stats of historical major league games — the same project that has evolved today into the amazing Retrosheet. Many esteemed writers contributed articles to “Baseball Analyst” over the years, including Pete Palmer, a 2010 Henry Chadwick Award winner; Craig Wright, the first full-time sabermetrician employed by a major league team (Texas Rangers); Phil Birnbaum, longtime editor of the Statistical Analysis Committee newsletter; Bill Deane, former Senior Research Associate at the Hall of Fame Library; and more.

Thanks to the generosity of Bill James and Phil Birnbaum, we are pleased to offer the entire run of “Baseball Analyst” for the first time online at SABR.org. Each of the 40 issues are available for download on our “Baseball Analyst” archives page. We’re also glad to have SABR member Rob Neyer, who began his baseball writing career as an assistant for Bill James — you can read James’ ad for the job in Issue 37 of August 1988 — introduce the collection here:

Oh, and thanks to Rob Neyer.