Lest We Forget: Seymour Siwoff

From The New York Times obituary by Richard Goldstein:

Seymour Siwoff, who brought statistical analysis to the sports world, chronicling feats from the epic to the arcane through seven decades as the head of the Elias Sports Bureau, died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 99.

Back in the day, I eagerly visited the Barnes and Noble near my office in the early spring when the new Bill James Baseball Abstract and Elias Baseball Analyst became available. Other titles — such as the Baseball Scouting Report and Baseball Scorecard (a product of USA Today which featured their cute little “fact-o-grams”) — and which I, of course, purchased came and went.

Siwoff was among that group of pioneers who made stats and analysis heretofore available only to baseball professionals something the average fan could enjoy and learn from. Undoubtedly, it was a great boon to those early practitioners of fantasy baseball.

Again, from the Times‘ obit:

In 1975 Mr. Siwoff began publishing The Player Analysis, printouts weighing some 40 pounds, for about a half-dozen major league baseball teams. The teams paid Elias to assess each of their players’ performances in a host of situations.
From 1985 to 1993, Elias put out a successor publication, the annual Elias Baseball Analyst, which was sold to the public. It has long issued The Elias Book of Baseball Records, an annual publication also available for purchase.

But I wonder what he might think of the statistical explosion of the 21st century, where every little occurrence is enumerated and stored for later dissection. According to the story,

“Statistics can be cold and trivial,” Mr. Siwoff was quoted as having said in the 1970s in “The Numbers Game: Baseball’s Lifelong Fascination With Statistics” (2004), by Alan Schwarz, a former reporter for The New York Times. “But they can also be alive and full of drama.”