See The Gamblers and Hustlers That Made Baseball’s Greatest Manager: Earl Weaver learned about playing the odds from his bookmaker uncle. Those lessons would turn him into a pioneer of modern analytics by John W. Miller. He is the author of the book The Last Manager: How Earl Weaver Tricked, Tormented, and Reinvented Baseball. Excerpts:
[Weavers'] "exposure to the gambling world helped make him into an early prophet of baseball analytics."
[A] "generation before Moneyball, as the longtime manager of the Baltimore
Orioles, Weaver valued drawing walks, high on-base averages, power-based
offenses, and innovative uses of strategy, and technology. He was also
the first manager to deploy a radar gun to measure pitching velocities."
"a
culture saturated by gambling was the perfect environment for young Earl
Weaver to grasp the elements of the game that actually went into
manufacturing wins.
“Earl
talked like a bookmaker,” said Dan Duquette, who hired Weaver to
instruct his manager and coaches when he was general manager of the
Montreal Expos in the 1990s.
Weaver peppered his postgame comments with gambling analogies."
"The sharps [gamblers] can be considered baseball’s first real sabermetricians, combing available data in the search for an edge.
In 1942,
a bookie from Ohio named Samuel J. Georgeson published Pitchers Record
Guide, a book with pitcher statistics from the previous season,
breakdowns versus specific teams, and charts that allowed gamblers to
track the performance of pitchers against individual teams during the
current season. “It can be of extreme value to know that a certain
pitcher is almost always successful against a certain team, but seldom
wins against another,” Georgeson wrote in the guide.
As
far back as 1956, an article in Esquire had also described a baseball
betting system based on 1-10 ratings for evaluating pitchers that relied
on earned-run averages, strikeouts, and bases on balls, while
disregarding win-loss records. “A pitcher, after being hit hard, can
leave a game at the end of the fifth inning with the score 8-to-6 in his
favor and be credited with a victory because his team eventually won
the game,” the magazine noted. It is “the ratio between his strikeouts
and his [walks]” that bookies look for, he wrote, preceding the insights
of modern analysts by decades.
Over a quarter-century later, Earl Weaver introduced to big-league
dugouts an awareness of the variability and complexity of matchups of
his team’s hitters against specific pitchers, and vice versa."
