John Thorn: Rickey and Roth and Lindsey and Cook

This week marks the second edition of the SABR Analytics Conference, in Phoenix (http://sabr.org/analytics). I had planned to attend, as I had last year, but a bothersome health blip has held me back east. I am something of a sabermetrician emeritus, anyway, and would have been an interested spectator rather than a contributor of fresh insight. My best work in the statistical line, in collaboration with Pete Palmer, is long behind me. All the same, I continue to approach the game analytically and I appreciate the great advances in sabermetrics in recent years.

To honor those advances and to place them in some historical perspective, I offer an excerpt from The Hidden Game of Baseball, published nearly thirty years ago—so far back that Pete and I were not yet ready to embrace the newfangled term “sabermetrics”! Let’s look at four baseball pioneers who plied their statistical trade before the world had heard of Bill James or my brilliant collaborator.

Thanks to Vin.