Malatzky: Some old-fashioned SABR metrics
From SABR member John Thorn at Our Game on January 8, 2016:
ou all know about sabermetrics, Bill James’s neologism for an analytical approach to baseball. Bill honored SABR with this coinage because SABR represented intellectual traits he admired: a dedication to research (it is, after all the Society for American Baseball Research), a conviction that significant aspects of the game are invisible to the naked eye, and a skepticism about received wisdom. In the early days of SABR many of its most skilled researchers concerned themselves not only with the relative merits of men who played in different eras but with determining who the players WERE. Hundreds of players were absolute ciphers, about whom nothing but a last name was known–a box score entry, that was all. Lee Allen and Bill Haber hunted for headstones; Vern Luse and Bill Carle scoured the squibs in Sporting Life. Today the number of major leaguers about whom absolutely nothing is known has been reduced to a relative handful, and for most men we even have a photographic or woodcut portrait. One player who resisted all efforts to go beyond a last name has been “Stine” or “Stein,” a one-gamer with the Philadelphia Athletics of 1890.
Sabermetrics is great, but this is old-fashioned SABR metrics, hard work and enormously gratifying. Richard Malatzky, a brilliant researcher, posted this to the Nineteenth Century Base Ball Research listserv on January 6.
Read the full article here: http://ourgame.mlblogs.com/2016/01/08/old-fashioned-sabr-metrics/
Originally published: January 8, 2016. Last Updated: January 8, 2016.