Dick Cramer honored with 2019 SABR Analytics Conference Lifetime Achievement Award
Sabermetric pioneer Dick Cramer was honored with the SABR Analytics Conference Lifetime Achievement Award on Saturday, March 9, 2019, in Phoenix, Arizona.
John Thorn, Major League Baseball’s Official Historian, presented Cramer with his award during the eighth annual SABR Analytics Conference.
“It’s certainly a wonderful occasion to be here; I very much appreciate this award and all of you for being here,” Cramer said. “For a long time, the sabermetric field was just me and Pete Palmer writing letters back and forth. It’s nice to see how much things have changed.”
Cramer has been a driving force in the statistical community for just about as long as anyone alive. He started analyzing baseball statistics in the mid-1960s, not long after graduating from Harvard, and by 1969 he had discovered (or re-invented) a worthy metric now known as OPS.
In the 1970s, Cramer — along with Bill James and Pete Palmer, the first two recipients of this award — co-founded SABR’s Statistical Analysis Committee and published a great deal of research, including work on clutch hitting that remains a touchstone more than four decades later. Cramer also co-founded STATS Inc. and in the past two decades has made many valuable contributions to Retrosheet. Cramer, a past recipient of SABR’s Henry Chadwick Award, is the author of the upcoming book, When Big Data Was Small: My Life in Baseball Analytics and Drug Design, to be published by University of Nebraska Press in the spring of 2019.
For more coverage of the 2019 SABR Analytics Conference, visit SABR.org/analytics.
Related links:
- Read Rob Neyer’s Henry Chadwick Award profile of Dick Cramer (Baseball Research Journal, Spring 2015)
- “Do Clutch Hitters Exist?”, by Dick Cramer (Baseball Research Journal, 1977)
- Check out highlights from the Origins of Baseball Analytics Panel with Dick Cramer, John Thorn, Pete Palmer, John Dewan, and John Walsh (2015 SABR Analytics Conference)
Originally published: March 9, 2019. Last Updated: July 27, 2020.