You used to be the go-to person to connect Sabermetric ideas to mainstream baseball. Now you're the go-to person to connect current baseball events to baseball's history. Do you agree? Is it something you've done consciously?I thought he might not like someone like me telling him what he is and isn't, but to my surprise, he answered:
Well, that's kind of you to say. But I've never done anything consciously in my life. Things have always just sort of happened, most of them positive.I'd like to expand here on what I said and what he said. I first started reading Rob Neyer in high school in the late 90s. This was before Twitter and before RSS was common, so I went to ESPN.com every day to see if he had posted anything new. Like many others, Rob Neyer was my introduction into the world of advanced MLB metrics (often called Sabermetrics). I wish ESPN had a better archive of his old work so I could provide an representative sample of his prowess in this area. Long before Moneyball was published in 2003, he was talking about the values of OBP and other "advanced" stats. He wasn't the person at the forefront of the research, but he was the one who knew how to present it to the masses.
As Sabermetrics became more mainstream and sites like Fangraphs and Baseball Prospectus gained popularity, I think there was no longer as much of a need for that bridge between modern baseball research and the average baseball fan. They even mentioning OPS and WAR on TV now. Like Rob says, he's "never done anything consciously in his life," but I think that he naturally started gravitating toward other areas where there was a need for a bridge between what his expertise and what the average reader might not know.
Eventually, he arrived at where he is now (along the way switching companies a few times). Better than anyone else, he's able to take baseball's present and connect it meaningfully to its past. He's even written some excellent books about this. Now he works at Fox Sports, and a lot of the things he writes have similar themes in the way they take a current baseball event and show how it fits in the overall history of baseball.
In short, his biggest skill is making connections. He made Sabermetrics accessible without being tedious. He now makes baseball history relevant without being boring.
