Photogrammetrist. Genealogist. Sabermetician.

I’ve known for most of my life that I must be obsessive/compulsive, although I’ve never sought medical advice to confirm that.

I have three passions that all involve gathering raw data, classifying, analyzing and then reporting the new knowledge obtained:

1. For the past 23 years I have made my living in Photogrammetry, which is the making of digital maps, mostly for civil engineers, from 3-D aerial photography.

2. For more than 10 years, I’ve spent much of my free time researching our family tree (now 185,000+ individuals), including most of the people who have ever lived in and near my hometown of Johnstown, Pa.

3. But long before either of those was my love of baseball statistics.

At almost 11 years of age, I had never watched a baseball game when I decide to take in the 1970 All-Star game. I knew that the Pirates played in Pittsburgh, but I didn’t know which league they played in. A little over two months later, I sat crying when the Pirates were eliminated in the playoffs by the cursed Cincinnati Reds (I would have my revenge nine years later, attending the game in which the Pirates eliminated the Reds and advanced to the 1979 World Series).

My mother showed me how to keep score, and by late 1972 I was scoring most of the games I listened to. Starting Opening Day in 1973 and lasting up though August of 1977, I kept score of every game the Pirates played.

Also in 1973 I was introduced to Strat-o-Matic baseball. Besides just playing the game, I wanted to know how it worked, and constructed add on rules and charts to make it even better. Ever since, I’d tended to look at research as to how it could be modeled in a simulation.

1976 was my first season playing outfield and pitching in our summer league. Ever thirsty for stats, before the 1978 season I stopped in at the City Recreation Office to see what I could get my hands on. Instead, I was told they had a vacancy and was asked if I would like to be the league statistician. I was playing in the league, and was also the head scorer and statistician! Johnstown also was the annual host of the All-American Amateur Baseball Association National Tournament, for which I also worked in the same positions. Shawn Hillegas (a distant cousin) was the only player from Johnstown who made it to the majors during my tenure. Every year the AAABA would have several players who would go on to the majors, including Orel Hershiser, Chris Sabo, Shawon Dunston, Jim Leyritz, Jim Abbott, John Smoltz, Denny Neagle, Todd Jones among many others.

I think it was 1981 when I read my first Bill James’ Baseball Abstract. It came in the mail, straight from Bill’s house. He had a lot of ideas, but lacked many of the play-by-play stats to test them. Even though I was working in amateur baseball, I designed scoresheets and a scoring system with which I could gather all the play-by-play and batted ball data in our league. Working with paper and pen, I spent the off season, and many college lectures, working on sabermetrics. Later I upgraded to a Tandy PC with no hard drive and 128k of RAM, but still wrote a relational db in MS-Basic to keep the league stats.

We had a wide variety of ballparks, from a high school field 320′ all the way around to another with no fences, to the Point Stadium, which was built inside a rectangle back in 1926 (255 down the LF line, 435 to right center). With all the teams playing a fairly equal number of games at all the fields, calculating park factors were simplified. Working with amateur players, a big question was if they could be successful professionals, which led to MLE formulas. In a lot of ways I had better data than the majors, so I could calculate “individual DER” for fielders, as well as baserunning and outfield throwing.

I got married in 1984, and had kids in ‘85 and ‘86. I continued to do the Johnstown league and the AAABA from long distance, as well as adding the Clark Griffith AAABA League in Washington DC to my list of clients, but after a few years it proved to be too much, and I “retired” in 1990, although I continued in an APBA play-by-mail league for a couple more seasons.

Later I filled the baseball void with genealogy, and had my subscription to Baseball Prospectus. In the summer of 2007 I asked myself “just how good is Rajai Davis?” and started a spreadsheet to calculate his major league equivalencies. All these old thoughts on MLEs, park factors, etc. came gushing out of my memory. When spreadsheets proved inadequate, I learned MS Access. Now I’m moving things over to MySQL, and have contributed to Tom Tango’s RetroSQL group.

Although I started in Sabermetrics on the local level almost 30 years ago, I am new to the Internet community. My main interests are in park factors, major league equivalencies, fielding and baserunning. I hope that I can contribute to the discussion and have the same success that I have had professionally and in genealogy.