Editing Sabermetrics (section)

== Early history ==
[[File:Henry Chadwick (NYPL b13537024-56451) (cropped).jpg|thumb|right|English-American sportswriter [[Henry Chadwick (writer)|Henry Chadwick]], the "father" of baseball statistics]]

English-American sportswriter [[Henry Chadwick (writer)|Henry Chadwick]] developed the [[Box score (baseball)|box score]] in New York City in 1858. This was the first way statisticians were able to describe the sport of baseball by numerically tracking various aspects of game play.<ref name=":0">{{Cite journal|last=Puerzer|first=Richard J.|date=Fall 2002|title=From Scientific Baseball to Sabermetrics: Professional Baseball as a Reflection of Engineering and Management in Society|journal=NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture|volume=11|pages=34–48|doi=10.1353/nin.2002.0042|s2cid=154849268}}</ref> The creation of the box score has given baseball statisticians a summary of the individual and team performances for a given game.<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.baseballhalloffame.org/hofers/detail.jsp?playerId=492558|title=The Hall of Famers - Henry Chadwick|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080412093802/http://www.baseballhalloffame.org/hofers/detail.jsp?playerId=492558|archive-date=2008-04-12}}</ref>

What would become the earliest Sabermetrics research in the 1970s and 1980s began in the middle of the 20th century with the writings of [[Earnshaw Cook]], one of the earliest baseball analysts. Cook's 1964 book ''Percentage Baseball'' was one of the first of its kind.<ref name="albert2">{{cite book|title=Curve Ball: Baseball, Statistics, and the Role of Chance in the Game|last=Albert|first=James|publisher=[[Springer Science+Business Media|Springer]]|year=2001|isbn=0-387-98816-5|pages=170–171|author2=Jay M. Bennett}}</ref> At first, most organized baseball teams and professionals dismissed Cook's work as meaningless. The idea of a science of baseball statistics began to achieve legitimacy in 1977 when [[Bill James]] began releasing ''Baseball Abstracts'', his annual compendium of baseball data.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.pbs.org/thinktank/transcript1197.html|title=Bill James, Beyond Baseball|date=June 28, 2005|publisher=[[Public Broadcasting Service|PBS]]|access-date=November 2, 2007|work=[[Think Tank with Ben Wattenberg]]}}</ref><ref>{{cite news|url=http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110010232|title=Sultan of Stats|last=Ackman|first=D.|date=May 20, 2007|newspaper=[[The Wall Street Journal]]|access-date=November 2, 2007}}</ref> However, James's ideas were slow to find widespread acceptance.<ref name="Monebyall2"/>

Bill James believed there was a widespread misunderstanding about how the game of baseball was played, claiming the sport was not defined by its rules but actually, as summarized by engineering professor Richard J. Puerzer, "defined by the conditions under which the game is played &ndash; specifically, the ballparks but also the players, the ethics, the strategies, the equipment, and the expectations of the public."<ref name=":0" /> Early Sabermetricians &ndash; sometimes considered baseball statisticians &ndash; began trying to enhance such fundamental baseball statistics as [[Batting average (baseball)|batting average]] (simply hits divided by at-bats) with advanced mathematical formulations.<ref name="jarvis">{{Cite web|url=http://knology.net/~johnfjarvis/runs_survey.html|title=A Survey of Baseball Player Performance Evaluation Measures|last=Jarvis|first=J.|date=2003-09-29|access-date=2007-11-02}}</ref><ref name=":1" /> The correlation between team batting average and runs scored was also examined,<ref name="jarvis" /> as runs &ndash; not hits &ndash; win ballgames. Thus, a good measure of a player's worth would be his ability to help his team score runs, which was observed to be highly correlated with his number of times on base &ndash; leading to the development of a new stat, "on-base percentage".

[[File:Davey Johnson 1986.jpg|thumb|right|MLB [[advanced metrics]] pioneer [[Davey Johnson]] (in 1986)]]

Before Bill James popularized sabermetrics, [[Davey Johnson]], then a second baseman playing for the early 1970s [[Baltimore Orioles]] of [[Major League Baseball]] (MLB), used an [[IBM System/360]] at team owner [[Jerold Hoffberger]]'s brewery to write a [[FORTRAN]]-based baseball [[computer simulation]]. In spite of his results, he was unable to persuade his manager [[Earl Weaver]] that he should bat second in the lineup. He wrote [[IBM BASIC]] programs to help him manage the [[Tidewater Tides]], and after becoming manager of the [[New York Mets]] in 1984, he arranged for a team employee to write a [[dBASE II]] application to compile and store [[advanced metrics]] on team statistics.<ref name="porter198405292">{{cite news|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ZqO7wRZjZQQC&pg=PA210|title=The PC Goes to Bat|date=1984-05-29|work=[[PC Magazine]] |pages=209|access-date=24 October 2013|author=Porter, Martin}}</ref> [[Craig R. Wright]] was another employee in MLB, working with the [[Texas Rangers (baseball)|Texas Rangers]] in the early 1980s. During his time with the Rangers, he became known as the first front office employee in MLB history to work under the title "sabermetrician".<ref>[http://www.rotojunkie.com/index.php?art/id:10 RotoJunkie – Roto 101 – Sabermetric Glossary (powered by evoArticles)<!-- Bot generated title -->] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070910212350/http://www.rotojunkie.com/index.php?art%2Fid%3A10 |date=2007-09-10 }}</ref><ref>[http://www.baseballspast.com/radio.htm BaseballsPast.com<!-- Bot generated title -->]</ref>

[[David Smith (baseball historian)|David Smith]] founded [[Retrosheet]] in 1989, with the objective of computerizing the box score of every major league baseball game ever played, in order to more accurately collect and compare the statistics of the game.

[[File:Billy Beane 1989.jpg|thumb|right|[[Billy Beane]] as a player in 1989]]
The [[Oakland Athletics]] began to use a more quantitative approach to baseball by focusing on sabermetric principles in the 1990s. This initially began with [[Sandy Alderson]] as the [[General manager (baseball)|general manager]] of the team when he used the principles toward obtaining relatively undervalued players.<ref name="Monebyall2">{{cite book|last=Lewis|first=Michael M.|title=Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game|title-link=Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game|publisher=[[W. W. Norton]]|year=2003|isbn=0-393-05765-8|location=[[New York City|New York]]|author-link=Michael Lewis}}</ref> His ideas were continued when [[Billy Beane]] took over as general manager in 1997, a job he held until 2015, and hired his assistant [[Paul DePodesta]].<ref name=":1">{{cite news|url=http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/06/01/RV145326.DTL|title=Billy Beane's brand-new ballgame|last=Kipen|first=D.|date=June 1, 2003|newspaper=[[San Francisco Chronicle]]|access-date=November 2, 2007}}</ref> During the 2002 season, a noted "moneyball" Oakland A's team went on to win 20 games in a row,<ref>{{cite web|title=Franchise Timeline|url=http://oakland.athletics.mlb.com/oak/history/timeline.jsp|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100330092153/http://oakland.athletics.mlb.com/oak/history/timeline.jsp|url-status=dead|archive-date=March 30, 2010}}</ref> a term (and approach to the game) which soon gained national recognition when [[Michael Lewis]] published ''[[Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game]]'' (where "unfair" reflected the disparity in resources available to the big market teams versus the small) in 2003 to detail Beane's use of advanced metrics. In 2011, a film based on Lewis' book &ndash; also called ''[[Moneyball (film)|Moneyball]] &ndash;'' was released and gave broad exposure to the techniques used in the Oakland Athletics' front office.