Yahoo’s Jeff Passan has an interesting and long in-depth piece today about sabermetrician Voros McCracken, the father of defense-independent pitching statistics (DIPS), which concluded that pitchers are responsible for three things and three things only: strikeouts, walks and home runs. Everything else on that happens on the baseball diamond — including hits — involves other players, as well as chance.
A decade after Baseball Prospectus let McCracken spread the gospel in a story that popularized DIPS across the sport, it remains among the most seminal theories developed by sabermetrics, the nickname given to quantitative baseball study. It’s almost certainly the most revolutionary. Nothing before or since has so upended an entire line of thought and forced teams to assess a wide breadth of players in a different fashion.
The Red Sox hired McCracken earlier this decade, but let go of him following the 2005 draft. All he has left from his time here was a watch the team gave him following the ’04 World Series. (Weren’t they handing out rings like candy back then?)