When Big Data Was Small: My Life in Baseball Analytics and Drug Design by Richard D. Cramer

Abstract

Reviewed by: When Big Data Was Small: My Life in Baseball Analytics and Drug Design by Richard D. Cramer Ed Edmonds Richard D. Cramer. When Big Data Was Small: My Life in Baseball Analytics and Drug Design. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019. 236 pp. Cloth, $28.95. Richard D. (Dick) Cramer, one of the founders of the baseball analytics movement now called sabermetrics, has written a compelling memoir that combines a candid discussion of his personal life, his career as a research drug chemist, and his baseball avocation. For many NINE readers with a strong knowledge of baseball history, the challenge presented by When Big Data Was Small will be to understand and to appreciate the material on Cramer's use of technology to further his work as a scientific researcher. This can be a daunting task for one not trained as a chemist or a computer scientist. Readers will be more comfortable reading the chapters on baseball statistical analysis, including Cramer's work with SABR members, his efforts with Project Scoresheet, and his partnership with John Dewan building STATS, Inc. However, Cramer's impact on scientific research exceeds what he has contributed to baseball analytics, as enormous as that is. Thus, one of the real strengths of this book for a willing reader is the introspective treatment that Cramer provides on his professional scientific research career and the coverage of his moonlighting activities on baseball and the impact that both had on his personal life. For many NINE readers and baseball scholars this represents a similar life pattern that allows for an interesting comparison of how one's career combines with time spent on baseball topics. As a youngster growing up in Landenberg, Pennsylvania, Dick, the oldest of four siblings, became enamored with creating lists. What started as writing out capital cities evolved into lists of different types of cars. During his early teenage years Dick developed an interest in baseball that pushed him to purchase the 1957 APBA tabletop baseball game produced in nearby Lancaster. The dice and card game was based on the performances of actual major league players during the previous year, and playing a full APBA season of two New York teams kindled an interest in determining how dice roll results compared to the cumulative outcome of actual statistics. Dick was hooked, and he began to produce numerous lists of baseball statistics. However, comprehensive data on the full history of the game was difficult to find. Later he was told about Hy Turkin and S. C. Thompson's The Official Encyclopedia of Major League Baseball, published by A. S. Barnes in 1951, and he started to mine the volume for detailed information. [End Page 153] Dick's father, who earned his PhD at Harvard, worked at DuPont as did many of Dick's neighbors. After completing high school, the young Cramer headed to Harvard with the goal of finishing his own PhD, a task he completed at MIT. During Dick's graduate school days, a project provided an opportunity to work with MIT's mainframe IBM, and the trajectory of his multiple career interests was established. Older readers familiar with early computer history will nod their head and smile when reading about the challenge of laboring for hours to create a deck of punched cards hoping they would get usable results a few days later. Younger readers will learn about these aspects of the early days of computer analysis. Advances in computer capability plus the 1969 publication of Macmillan's Baseball Encyclopedia led Cramer to the creation of OXS (On-base-average times slugging percentage) as a better evaluation of batting prowess. Around this time, Cramer noticed an advertisement in The Sporting News for a "Society of American Baseball Research." Dick figured that he needed to find out more about the group, and he contacted SABR founder Bob Davids. Davids referred Cramer to Pete Palmer, one of the few other SABR members with a similar interest. Cramer offers that "while it was Bill James with his volumes of provocative ideas so eloquently expressed who brought sabermetrics out of the closet, Pete Palmer was its intellectual creator, the Newton or the Darwin of sabermetrics" (50...