5/9/23
25 years. It is crazy to me that my dad has been gone 25 years. Something about that number is remarkable to me and makes that day feel closer as if it collapses time or opens a portal to that evening I was sitting front row at County Stadium watching my Milwaukee Brewers fall behind early to the Houston Astros when suddenly a disembodied voice from the skies called out my name and requested I go to the fan assistance center where I would be stunned by the news that my dad had died.
But it also seems like lifetimes ago when i consider all the changes personally and in the world during the past 25 years. From a global pandemic and 9/11 to the internet and cell phones, May 9th, 1998 seems like ancient times.
The game of baseball has seen changes in that time too and one of the biggest has been in the use of statistical analysis.
My dad began reading Bill James from his first book which coincided with when i began taking an interest in the sport, so from the beginning I engaged baseball with all the childlike enthusiasm for a game combined with critical thinking. This was an ideal way to come of age. My dad and i would play catch and then use Bill's formulas to debate who were the best players from past and present. These were some of the greatest gifts anyone has ever shared with me and I still miss sharing them with him.
The film Moneyball does a rather great job of showing how Bill James' Sabermetrics were changing the game. But it left out what I found to be the most important part of Michael Lewis' book of the same name. In the book, the question is asked---if baseball has all these stats to measure a player's value and we are still discovering how much we don't know about a player's worth, what does that say for all the other workers in all the other occupations which haven't got any formulas or stats at all?
Fortunately, life doesn't have to follow the rules of baseball or economics. There may not be formulas to analyze and measure how someone has impacted our lives. But even Bill James was interested in language, not numbers, he wanted "the numbers to acquire the significance of language." And all these years after my dad first introduced me to James' approach, I have found that today in the number 25. This marker holds all the drama and possesses all of the power of poetry.
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