Kaplan: Leonard Koppett’s ‘Thinking Man’s Guide to Baseball’
From Dave Kaplan at The National Pastime Museum on June 28, 2017:
Before the age of sabremetrics, which spawned new statistics and the current high-tech Statcast Era of exit velocities, catch probabilities, and launch angles, there was a cultured and scholarly sportswriter who analyzed every aspect of baseball, on and off the field, enriching his readers with his astute and brilliant observations for over six decades.
So it seems important today to re-appreciate the genius of Leonard Koppett. If data-driven advances are the rage in baseball, and statistics are the lifeblood of the sport, Koppett was ahead of his time, a pre-Internet pioneer of analytics. He used uncommon statistics in his baseball stories and columns not to explain what happened, but why it happened.
Yet shortly before he died in 2003, Koppett warned that “the excessive use of statistics, if not checked, may turn out to be a fatal malady.”
Read the full article here: https://www.thenationalpastimemuseum.com/article/leonard-koppett-s-thinking-man-s-guide-baseball
Originally published: June 28, 2017. Last Updated: June 28, 2017.