Jaw Breaker wrote:
My first exposure to Sabermetrics was the first or second Baseball Abstract by Bill James, and the thing that stood out the most to me was the park factors that he had calculated. There are so many ways specific fields affect performance, it was eye-opening. Some were well-known (Wrigley's daytime visibility helping boost averages but short alleys reducing triples, Coors Field's altitude, etc.) but some were less obvious...one that stood out was Oakland's enormous foul territory--batters like Tenace probably lost a lot of hits on foul pops that would be in the stands in most parks.
My first exposure to SABR came the same way via a guy named Howard Abernathy who was in my fantasy baseball league. He showed up with a mimeographed copy of one of the early editions of the
Abstract. Of course, this made for lots of arguments as James was the champion of guys I had considered not much more than ordinary players, guys like Roy White and Darrell Porter. Howard took me to a SABR meeting, which was a bunch of poorly dressed geeks sitting around talking about baseball arcana. Some of the guys in the league gave Howard the derisive nickname, "Mr. Baseball". Howard and I drank a lot of Johnnie Black and argued a lot of baseball. I learned how to push his buttons and I once made him storm out of Quencher's muttering "Sammy Sosa" repeatedly. The Puerto Rican yuppies and hipster girls must have thought he was borderline insane, which he was. Howard died in 1999 or 2000. I'm sure he is somewhere cheering on his beloved Cardinals in their latest run of NL dominance.