Baseball Prospectus more than diamond in the rough

On a cool weeknight in June, Rany Jazayerli sits in the left-field bleachers at U.S. Cellular Field.

In his muted dress shirt and slacks, the balding 34-year-old Jazayerli looks like so many other fans who hustled from work to ingest this game between the White Sox and Oakland.

Only the fistful of compatriots and friends sitting around the mild-mannered Naperville resident know his secret identity.

Jazayerli isn't just a Johns Hopkins-educated dermatologist with offices in St. Charles and Sycamore. He's the guy who might have contributed as much to today's baseball landscape as the players on the field, the managers in the dugout and the general managers stationed in the high-rent suites.

In December 1995, during his first year of med school at the University of Michigan, Jazayerli conspired with four other analytical fanatics to form Baseball Prospectus.

Armed with theories and thoughts and suspicions honed from years of research and discussions on rec.sport.baseball - the Usenet group that preceded the World Wide Web - Gary Huckaby, Christina Kahrl, Clay Davenport, Joe Sheehan and Jazayerli teamed up with hopes of drilling the sport they love with the sabermetric equivalent of a 100 mph fastball to the helmet.

If they could have summed up their mission with a bumper-sticker slogan, it might have read something like this:

New-school stats rule, stone-age baseball men drool.

"At the time, it's almost easy to forget just how different baseball was," Jazayerli says over continual noise pouring from U.S. Cellular's loudspeakers.

"Not only was statistical analysis something that wasn't sort of mainstream, but it was almost mocked. It was really degraded both by baseball teams and also by the media.

"I think there was a frustration that sabermetrics - statistical analysis - had something to offer the game.

"I got into this because there were such obvious mistakes that teams were making it just felt like - you almost felt compelled to point these things out and hope that somehow we could change the game."

Baseball Prospectus attacked the game on several fronts, but a local development gave BP a big opportunity within a few years of opening its virtual doors.

A month after Cubs rookie Kerry Wood forged his legend by striking out 20 Houston Astros on May 6, 1998, Jazayerli introduced his "Pitcher Abuse Points" formula that suggested each pitch past 100 increased a starting pitcher's fatigue and therefore his chance for injury.

By September, after enduring 7 starts of at least 120 pitches (including a 133-pitch outing in a 9-2 win over Cincinnati on Aug. 26), Wood was sidelined with an elbow injury that eventually required Tommy John surgery and all but knocked him out until May 2000.

"It all started with Kerry Wood's first injury," Jazayerli said. "Suddenly we were getting calls, which was all very new to us. We didn't even know anybody in the media was reading us."

Baseball Prospectus' band of writers and researchers proceeded to crank out so many more intriguing concepts and metrics - VORP (Value Over Replacement Player), EqA (Equivalent Average) and PERA (Peripheral ERA), just to name a few - that sabermetrics gained more than a foothold inside the baseball world.

Bill James, whose "Baseball Abstracts" in the 1980s provided the launching point for sabermetrics, joined the Boston Red Sox front office. MIT graduate Keith Woolner, the wizard who invented VORP, joined the Cleveland Indians as manager of baseball research and analytics.

Other sabermetrically inclined researchers (and not just ones associated with Baseball Prospectus) have found jobs with major-league clubs. You can't swing a Louisville Slugger in any front office without tagging Ivy League-educated up-and-comers.

As for those who have stayed with Baseball Prospectus, such as Jazayerli, Sheehan and Kahrl, in addition to their work on their Web site (baseballprospectus.com), they can be read in Sports Illustrated and seen on ESPN thanks to partnerships with those media goliaths.

In short, the revolution is over. Sabermetrics and Baseball Prospectus have won.

"I would think so," Kahrl said thoughtfully.

"What we originally set out to do, at least in the short term, has been accomplished. I'm very satisfied with that."

<div class="infoBox"> <h1>More Coverage</h1> <div class="infoBoxContent"> <div class="infoArea"> <h2>Stories</h2> <ul class="links"> <li><a href="/story/?id=300757">Even BP admits it's not just about stats<span class="date"> [6/16/09]</span></a></li> </ul> </div> </div> </div>