Allan Roth: The First (Professional) Baseball Statistician (2019)

Roth’s story is interesting because it exhibits a combination of brilliance and perseverance.

Baseball is a uniquely quantifiable sport due to the degree that the continuum of events on the field can be compressed into discrete records, the large number of games played by teams, and quasi-isolated contest of the current batter vs the pitcher.

Roth was one of the first to realize that a statistical approach could give a team a competitive edge, even beyond those tallied by score keepers of his day. However, it took perseverance on his part to convince a team to take a chance on what his analysis could offer. Moreover, he was working at the dawn of computing well before such analysis could be run in a short period of time.

A decent amount of Roth’s work was not fully appreciated in his time. Certain capabilities like walk rates and spray charts (where batters tend to hit balls) weren’t properly valued until this century with the revolution of the Moneyball Oakland Athletics. Even his own team addled him when management turned over despite his contributions.

Overall his story is an interesting read at the intersection of sports, statistics / computing, and passion.