A book is a collaborative work, because every human being is—even in our existence—an act of collaboration. In sports, we often speak of the Most Valuable Player, and even outside the context of sports, people know what the abbreviation “MVP” means. There is a phrase in Latin, sine qua non, which translates as “who not without,” that I prefer. Where baseball has one MVP Award, I prefer instead to think of SQN awards. Plural. While the words in this book spilled from my synapses through my fingers and onto my keyboard, there are some key people, sine qua non, the events that inspired my synapses would never have happened.
I owe the very existence of my synapses and fingers, my baseball fandom, and the fact that I survived to adulthood to my parents, Jake and Beth Carleton.
I owe my love of writing to a number of teachers who nurtured that part of me, including Ms. Jeanette Werner, Br. Joseph Chvala, C.S.C., Mr. Tom Carey, Mr. Grant Wanner, and Mr. Ross Piché. I owe my ability with numbers to the work of my high school calculus teacher, Mr. Paul Bosley, and my college stats professor, Dr. Sarah Murnen. The debt of gratitude that I owe Mr. Daniel Cavoli is eclipsed only by the amount of time it would take to explain what exactly it was that Mr. Cavoli taught me. Oddly enough, this book probably owes the largest portion of its R-squared to the influence of my American History teacher, Mr. James Nieberding, whose advice to always seek out more data has quietly rung in my ears far beyond my teenage years.
I learned to be a proper researcher—along with a few lessons on human growth and development—under the kind guidance of my undergraduate research advisor, Dr. Linda Smolak. My graduate dissertation chair, Dr. Kathryn Grant, trusted me enough to put me in charge of the data team on a giant research project that had become her life’s work. I got to learn on the fly how to be a data manager, and not just a data analyst.
Dr. Sheila Ribordy, may she rest gently, was the first in a long line of kind souls whom I met in Chicago when I was a terrified replacement-level adult. I can think of no better tribute than to place her name in the pages of a baseball book, even if she was a White Sox fan. Jeremy Taylor sat around with me in the Stress and Coping Project “dungeon” and we talked regression models, Cubs, and clinical psychology on more days than I can count. In Chicago, I even found my way to a church that doubled as a baseball fan collective. On Sundays, we would gather to discuss the important things in life, and also religion. At some point, Mike Dorosh, we are going to steal Fr. John’s official hat and embroider a White Sox logo on it. I’m 95 percent confident that he’ll think it’s funny.
Evan Brunell asked me to join a small sports blog network that he had created as a sabermetrics writer after reading some of my work on Blogspot (hello, 2006!). At Statistically Speaking, I got to work with a lot of really cool people, some of whom went on to work for MLB teams, including Sean Smith, Mike Fast, Matt Swartz, Colin Wyers, and Brian Cartwright. When I took some time off after the birth of my oldest daughter and was thinking about getting back into writing about baseball, Eric Seidman asked me, “Would you be interested in writing at Baseball Prospectus?”
Kevin Goldstein and Christina Kahrl, and later Joe Hamrahi, were willing to take a chance on me at BP, which is the nerdy baseball writing equivalent of being asked to join the Beatles. John Perotto, Ben Lindbergh, Sam Miller, and Aaron Gleeman have, at one time or another, been willing to say yes to projects that started with “I have a crazy idea for an article…” Ben and Sam, who wrote a book together detailing how they ran an independent league baseball team in the Summer of 2015, indirectly spurred me to go through with this project. I figured that if those two could get a book published, it couldn’t be that hard.
Dave Smith, who runs Retrosheet.org, an online repository of play-by-play and game data that stretches back into the 1930s, has made all of that data available for free to anyone who wants it. For this effort, he should be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. I am not exaggerating.
I also owe Sean Forman at Baseball Reference a debt of gratitude for his work in putting together Baseball Reference, a data resource that I discovered in college and have been using ever since, including in this book. I used data from Fangraphs (thanks, David Appelman) and Baseball Prospectus (thanks, Dave Pease and Rob McQuown) as well.
Parts of this book originally appeared on the electronic pages of Baseball Prospectus and have been edited for publication here. Stephen Reichert and Sean Neugenbauer at BP helped me leap over some legal hurdles along the way. At BP, I have the luxury of picking the brains of some wonderful writers and collaborators, including Kate Morrison, Harry Pavlidis, Dan Brooks, and Jonathan Judge, all of whom sharpened the ideas that went into this book.
Jonah Keri introduced me to Adam Motin, managing editor at Triumph Books, and (spoilers!) that conversation went rather well. Mark Simon also gave me some friendly advice during the process. The fact that all of the sentences in this book have verbs in them is a tribute to Jesse Jordan of Triumph, who served as my editor. Clarissa Young also walked me through the contract process with aplomb.
I am also indebted to a number of “friends” inside Major League Baseball front offices who have kindly answered my questions when I have asked them. Special thanks go to Mike Chernoff and Keith Woolner of the Cleveland Indians, who gave me a chance to live out a childhood dream, if in a slightly altered form from the way that I had dreamed it up.
In the single nerdiest double entendre that I have ever made, I would like to thank William James.
Tanya Klimova ended up being one of the main characters in this book because she remains the most interesting person that I have ever met, despite the fact that she’s not a baseball fan. When I told her that I was thinking about writing a book, she was the one who told me that I should do it and suggested that it be called My Wife Is Awesome (Also, Baseball). Sorry, sweetheart. The publisher made me change it.
I am a fortunate man to have been carried so far by so many. May every kindness be repaid to you a thousand times over.