SABR Nine: Elias Sports Bureau Executive Vice President Steve Hirdt
Editor’s note: This article by Ryan Chamberlain was published in the July-August 2006 edition of the SABR Bulletin and is reprinted in its original form here. For more from the SABR Bulletin archives, click here.
By Ryan Chamberlain
The Elias Sports Bureau has been a major force in sports statistics and records since its inception by Al and Walter Elias in 1913.
Since being appointed official statisticians for the National League and International League (and later the American League) in 1919, Elias has grown to also become the official statisticians for the National Football League, the National Basketball Association, the National Hockey League, Major League Soccer, and the Arena Football League.
Steve Hirdt, the current executive vice president of the Elias Sports Bureau, has helped guide the organization into the modern era. A SABR member since 1985, we’re pleased to share some of his wit and wisdom in this issue’s SABR Nine.
1. How did you get started in base ball statistics?
I guess I got involved in baseball statistics the first time that I bought a pack of bubble-gum cards and turned them over. I was always an avid sports fan, and in high school compiled the statistics for our basketball and baseball teams. While in college, I worked part-time for a small company that did most of the statistical work on Macmillan’s first Baseball Encyclopedia; though that company went belly-up shortly after the book was published, while I worked there I had heard about Elias and, while still in college, I applied to Elias for a part-time job. At the time, Elias had just added the NBA as a client, and I was brought aboard and eventually made full-time (when no TV or radio station seemed to accept my audition tapes with the eagerness with which I had prepared them). I think that with me, the full-time staff expanded from six to seven. After a while, as I came to realize the impact that computers would have on our business, I sent out fewer and fewer audition tapes and finally figured that I’d do this for a while. What started out as “for a while” has lasted a little longer than I had imagined.
2. Who was the biggest influence on your career?
My parents, of course. Growing up in New York, in a mixed marriage (father: a New York Giants fan; mother: a Brooklyn Dodgers fan), and my brothers, cousins and friends were all Yankees fans, so sports always seemed part of the landscape — either playing, going to games, or following them on radio and TV. I don’t remember which of them taught me to keep score of a game, but I remember doing it at the age of six. (No, we didn’t track pitch counts back then.) When I got into it professionally, Seymour Siwoff, longtime owner of Elias, became an important influence.
In the pre-computer days, it was Seymour who created the systems and redundancy necessary to sharpen in a dramatic way the accuracy of the statistics that were compiled — something for which he has received scant public credit. Later, at an age when he could just as easily have thrown up his hands at the advent of computer technology, he took the opposite tack, and still to day, could lead a discussion of such technologies with men and women not half his age. Before I got to Elias, Seymour’s dedication had already attracted the attention of Pete Rozelle, who made Elias the official NFL statistician within a year of his ascension to the commissioner’s job. In addition, Seymour’s work ethic and generosity are second to none.
As far as other, early statisticians about whom I learned, the brothers Mills and Allan Roth made important contributions to understanding the game.
3. What is a typical day like at Elias Sports Bureau?
The Elias Bureau is an around-the-clock, around-the-year operation, one where because of the never-ending cycles of professional sports in this country, it’s difficult to schedule things like computer backups, system upgrades, vacations — even weddings. (It’s a good thing that the Mets-Yankees World Series in 2000 ended in five games, otherwise the staff would never have forgiven our Chris Slowik for scheduling his wedding the evening of what would have been Game Six!)
Our staff receives, verifies and corrects the statistical reports generated at each game, answers questions and provides its own pro-active “take” on events of the day for the leagues, the teams and other various clients, including the largest sports media companies. In baseball season, we’ll always have someone traveling – for example, to the telecast of a game or to ESPN’s studios, where the Elias Research Desk is located just off-set in the Baseball Tonight and SportsCenter studios. Same thing in football — Elias has worked on the telecasts of the major sports events since the mid-1970s. For me personally, I’ve worked as the Director of Information on nearly a thousand national telecasts, including 12 World Series, 12 League Championship Series, 12 All-Star Games, seven Super Bowls, and two NBA Finals.
Accuracy has always been the hallmark of Elias’s work. It takes a while to develop new employees, teaching them the ins-and-outs of our data files and schooling them in what makes for an interesting statistical note, and what doesn’t. Still, every day brings a challenge of putting that day’s events, large and small, into historical context.
4. What is the best part of your job with Elias?
I actually like the daily challenge that I alluded to earlier, both of being correct and of finding interesting things in that day’s events, for use by our clients. I also enjoy the change of seasons. In my early years with the company, I can remember a lot of “down time” in February and March, when the daily pressure was off — but as the sports schedules have grown longer, and we have added more clients and responsibilities, I don’t know what happened to that “down time.” And that’s OK — it’s great, in fact.
5. In your time with Elias, what are some of the more challenging statistical baseball factoids that you have compiled?
The thing about our notes (“factoids” seems a bit much) is that they are directed toward a very particular time and place — during a game or right after it — and that, divorced from that time-sensitivity, they can seem a little less lustrous. If I said that no major-league team had ever won a postseason game in which it trailed by three-or-more runs going to the ninth inning, well, that might seem like a “so-what” fact. But mention it on a telecast and then see it happen in two consecutive games in the 1986 Angels-Red Sox American League Championship Series, and it creates an impact. (The amazing thing is that, even today, there have been only three such games in major-league history, and all three came within a five-day span in 1986: Games Four and Five of the Angels-Red Sox series, and Game Six of the National League Championship Series between the Mets and Astros.)
The time pressures that we face – to get information to our clients when they can best use it – make collaboration among our staff members very important. As to the information itself, of course, yesterday’s avant-garde information seems ho-hum today. I well remember the impact that some of our play-by-play based information made when we first used it on television in the late 1970s and early 1980s, on ABC’s “Monday Night Baseball” series, but to talk today about the impact that we made then with breakdowns of how batters did against particular pitchers, or how players performed against left- or right-handed opponents, or in late-inning pressure situations — to a younger generation of fans, the response might be, “Duh. Haven’t those things always existed?” Well, no they haven’t.
6. How does the method and accuracy of current record-keeping at Elias compare and contrast to when you first started with the organization over 30 years ago?
The job completely changed with the advent of computers in the mid-to-late 1970s. Prior to that, much of the day would be spent doing calculations, but now there is much more analysis of the numbers than was possible previously. When the work was done manually, each day’s performance was recorded on individual player sheets, which were color-coded by team. When Tom Seaver was traded from the light-gray New York Mets to the bright-yellow Cincinnati Reds, it took some getting used to.
It’s easy to say that statistics are kept more accurately today than in previous generations. The primary reason is that they didn’t have computers. But that’s no reason to be smug; the early eras of baseball are remarkable for how well documented they were. Of course, not all statistical categories that are kept today were compiled 100 years ago, and there was a more casual approach to record-keeping than is present to day. Still, I have great respect for the work that early statisticians did, facing daily obstacles that must have made their task supremely difficult.
7. What standards are applied by Elias to resolve discrepancies when new research is unveiled?
I presume that you are talking about corrections to statistics from past seasons, often in the distant past. When proof is available that there is a mistake in the game-by-game records from past seasons, corrections should be made. We employ a standard of proof that lies somewhere between two of the standards common to judicial matters in this country: that is, somewhere between proof that is “clear and convincing” and proof that is “beyond a reasonable doubt.” It’s not good enough to make an historical change on the basis of a he-says-she-says standard, or a 51-to-49 standard — where one newspaper source says one thing and the official sheet says another. The evidence has got to be more substantial than that for us to consider a change.
Elias makes many of these historical corrections, mostly based on our own initiative, but sometimes based on material that is provided to us by other people, including some SABR members. It’s amusing when not only casual fans, but people who have spent significant portions of their lives around baseball attach a belief in the precision of early baseball statistics that is — there’s no other way to say it — almost childlike. Around the time that Rickey Henderson was challenging Ty Cobb’s all-time runs-scored record, there was some focus on someone’s claim that, by God, a mistake had been found in Cobb’s game-by-game statistics and that Cobb should be credited with one more run than Elias showed. I say it’s amusing, because we knew not only of that particular error, but of more than a dozen dealing with Cobb’s runs-scored total.
8. With Elias handling the stats for many different professional sports beyond baseball such as the NFL and NBA, do the increasingly overlapping seasons create more of a challenge?
The change of seasons is actually refreshing, but a sport never really goes out of season for us anymore. The responsibilities change: from the day-to day maintenance and distribution of statistics while the season is in progress, to off-season responsibilities such as putting out books, providing data to teams for talent evaluation and public relations material, and providing leagues with data relating to potential rule changes.
The challenge is simply stated: To maintain the quality of service that we have historically provided to our clients, and for which we have a sterling reputation.
9. With new developments such as advanced pitch-by-pitch and play-by-play computerized and video data tracking methods, what does the future hold for statistical analysis?
We live in a society that is clearly much more data-conscious than any other in the history of civilization. Today’s decision-makers in sports are much more comfortable with making statistical analysis a component in their decisions than were most of their predecessors. The challenge now, of course, is not to become a slave to the data. Seeing teams that refuse to use a sacrifice bunt, even in situations where they should be playing for a very important run, is a good example. Yes, we’ve all seen the studies that teams average more runs per inning after a runner on first and none out than they do after a runner on second and one out — but this is only an average. And a manager is never faced with an average situation; he’s always faced with a specific situation, one in which he knows what part of the lineup is due up, which relievers are available, who’s hurt, and dozens of other variables that get lost in the averaging process. So maybe you won’t use the bunt in the fourth inning of a game in May; but perhaps you should use it in a winner-take-all playoff game, down by a run in the eighth inning, with a runner on first and none out.
Still, making predictions of what things will be like 10 or 20 years from now is an exercise doomed to fail. I remember attending the 1964 World Fair in New York – just across the street from the newly-opened Shea Stadium — and seeing the exhibits that dealt with what life would be like when we grew up. Now, I’m fully grown; and as others have observed before me, where are the flying cars?
Originally published: July 13, 2006. Last Updated: August 24, 2026.