My foreword to Dick Cramer’s new memoir
FROM: When Big Data Was Small: My Life in Baseball Analytics and Drug Design, by Richard D. Cramer, University of Nebraska Press, 2019.
Richard D. Cramer has been doing baseball analytics for just about as long as anyone alive, even before the term “sabermetrics” existed. He started analyzing baseball statistics as a hobby in the mid-1960s, not long after graduating from Harvard and MIT. He was a research scientist for SmithKline and in his spare time used his work computer to test his theories about baseball statistics. One of his earliest discoveries was that clutch hitting — then one of the most sacred pieces of received wisdom in the game — didn’t really exist. In When Big Data Was Small Cramer recounts his life and remarkable contributions to baseball knowledge. I am honored that Dick, my friend for some 35 years, asked me to write the foreword. His book — along with many other fine baseball titles — may be purchased from University of Nebraska Press at 40 percent off its list price until April 30: https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/baseball-sale/.
Five or six years ago, Bill James and I were booked for a panel at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. As we walked the long corridor toward the ballroom in which we were to appear, I remarked upon the hundreds, if not thousands, of fresh-faced young people who surrounded us on all sides, each hoping to make a career in sports analytics.
“Remember when,” I asked him, “the number of sports analysts was a relative handful?”
“I remember,” he replied, “when you could fit all of them in a hotel room.”
Even in 1977, when James issued his first, self-published Baseball Abstract, Dick Cramer would have been in the room. He was present at the creation, when the entirety of SABR’s statistical analysis committee consisted of correspondence between Dick and Pete Palmer.
But, you may be asking, who is Dick Cramer? Why would he write a memoir? I can answer the first, briefly, as I have known him for thirty-five years and we have played, now and then, in the same baseball sandbox; he will tell you a great deal more soon enough. But it is the second question that truly commends this book to your attention.
Cramer has led a life of extraordinary accomplishment, fueled by curiosity coupled with persistence and a knack for making things work. When Big Data Was Small recalls a seemingly simpler time when information science was finding its feet and so was he. His interests as a boy might have predicted the future of many an aspiring nerd, myself included: list-making; model-airplane building; Gilbert chemistry sets (and/or Erector sets); baseball statistics and simulations; antiquarian music (in his case Dixieland, in mine country blues). Finding reality not altogether satisfying, he suspected that Pythagoras might have it right — that in mathematics one might hear the music of the spheres.
A winner of lifetime achievement awards in baseball and in chemistry, both for information-based work, Cramer grew up near Wilmington, Delaware, where his father worked for DuPont. He tells the story of his formative years in an utterly charming way, describing offhand oddities as if they were the run of the mill. This portion of the book is to me sweet, sad, and splendidly ordinary: all of us experienced childhood as he did, seldom pausing to think that our experiences, or indeed ourselves, might be in the least unusual.
Young Dick turned to baseball early on. In 1958, when he was sixteen, he bought a baseball dice game (APBA, an acronym for “American Professional Baseball Association”), in which players performed as probability, based upon their past performances, indicated. That his favorite team, the Philadelphia Phillies, managed to toss away the 1964 pennant with an epic slide in the season’s final weeks may have confirmed for him that the mathematical realm of baseball might be less frustrating. Later in that decade, he moved beyond APBA to computer simulations, including the invention of an early incarnation of OPS (On Base Plus Slugging, which Cramer created as OxS, or On Base Times Slugging).
With Pete Palmer, he was present at the creation of the baseball analytics movement — at first in a nascent baseball research society, later within Major League Baseball via the first computerized analytics system in the game, for the Oakland A’s in 1981. (It was in that year that I met Palmer.) Along the way, Cramer had earned an AB in Chemistry & Physics from Harvard and a PhD in Physical Organic Chemistry from MIT.
The implications of analyzing a team’s assets (players) methodically (mathematically rather than intuitively) led Bill James to label the analytical movement as Sabermetrics, in honor of the Society for American Baseball Research … SABR] where so many of us had cut our teeth; when Michael Lewis named it Moneyball in his book of that title, the concept soon began to extend beyond baseball to the unrelated realms of microbiology, economic markets, and data mining research, with new avenues to understanding opened up by what has come to be termed Big Data.
Beginning with a baseball dice game and a boyhood chemistry set, Cramer has come up with discoveries that transformed both disciplines. He was a co-founder of Stats, LLC, which after some corporate shakeout that included Dick’s departure, continues as a force in sports information.
In a delightful confluence of Cramer’s vocation and avocation, in 2013 he received the Herman Skolnik Award, presented by the American Chemical Society’s Division of Chemical Information. This entitled him to chair a symposium at which emeritus professor of microbiology David W. Smith spoke. In the baseball community Smith is known as the founder of Retrosheet, which excavates play-by-play records of ancient major-league games. Cramer has long provided Retrosheet with a significant percentage of such finds, and at this writing has turned his records-spelunking efforts to the nineteenth century.
For a memoir to be worth reading it ought to sum up not only one’s own accomplishments but also those who were important in enabling or obstructing them. Even the most seemingly solitary life, populated largely with ideas and actions, is lived among others. Present at the creation, and himself a creator, Dick was, like all of us, more than the workings of his mind.
What makes this book more than a curriculum vitae, no matter how distinguished, is that it is about a life like any other: filled with great expectations and shattering disappointments, both personal and professional. Cramer pulls no punches, while acknowledging his share in whatever mischief may have befallen him. Has he loved his work too much, and hewn to his own path in an uncompromising way? Perhaps. But from where I sit, his is a life worth emulating and his endeavor — in his eighth decade, making bold to write a memoir — may be worth emulating, too.
When Big Data Was Small was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.