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Pete Palmer (born January 30, 1938) is an American sports statistician and encyclopedia editor. He is a major contributor to the applied mathematical field referred to as sabermetrics. Along with the Bill James Baseball Abstracts , Palmer's book The Hidden Game of Baseball is often referred to as providing the foundation upon which the field of sabermetrics was built. [1]
Palmer began his career as a baseball analyst when he worked for the Raytheon Corporation as a radar systems engineer. At night, after his co-workers had left for the day, Palmer used the company's (at the time) cutting-edge computers to run advanced simulations analyzing historical baseball statistics. In 1982, he gained notoriety when he recognized a scorekeeper's error which counted a 1910 Detroit Tigers box score twice, crediting Ty Cobb with an extra two hits and three at-bats. That year Cobb was declared the batting champion, despite an unsuccessful effort by the St. Louis Browns to help Cleveland Naps star Nap Lajoie overtake Cobb. If the double-counted game were to be removed Cobb's average would finish second to Lajoie, though Major League Baseball still lists Cobb as the batting average leader. Palmer also innovated the Linear Weights method of estimating a player's offensive contributions, an invention that will likely be his lasting legacy. Palmer, with help from Dick Cramer, invented OPS (on-base plus slugging) in 1978, which now is universally accepted as a measure of batting ability.
Many of Palmer's early works were written in partnership with John Thorn, including The Hidden Game of Baseball and Total Baseball ; the latter book also featured, in later editions, the contributions of editor Michael Gershman. Palmer edited or served as a consultant for many of the sports reference books produced by Total Sports Publishing. Palmer's most recent work has been in collaboration with Gary Gillette. Since 2003, the pair has produced five editions of the ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia, and several other baseball annuals. In 2010 he was named a charter member of the Henry Chadwick Society by SABR (Society for American Baseball Research) and also received a lifetime achievement award from them in 2018.
Palmer has also played a significant role in the field of football statistics. In the seventies, he served as editor for several editions of the A.S. Barnes football encyclopedia. In 1973, he joined the stat crew of the New England Patriots, compiling the official statistics for the team's home games. Palmer continued this task through the 2016 season.
In 1988, Palmer published The Hidden Game of Football, with co-authors Thorn and Bob Carroll. The book was updated and re-released in 1998 and is still considered the seminal work on football analysis. [2] He was also co-editor (with Gillette, Sean Lahman, et al.) of the ESPN Pro Football Encyclopedia.
Palmer has three children. Emily, the oldest, Stephen, the youngest, and Daniel. He resides in Hollis, New Hampshire.
On-base plus slugging (OPS) is a sabermetric baseball statistic calculated as the sum of a player's on-base percentage and slugging percentage. The ability of a player both to get on base and to hit for power, two important offensive skills, are represented. An OPS of .800 or higher in Major League Baseball puts the player in the upper echelon of hitters. Typically, the league leader in OPS will score near, and sometimes above, the 1.000 mark.
In sports analytics, sabermetrics is the empirical analysis of baseball, especially baseball statistics that measure in-game activity. Sabermetricians collect and summarize the relevant data from this in-game activity to answer specific questions. The term is derived from the acronym SABR, which stands for the Society for American Baseball Research, founded in 1971. The term "sabermetrics" was coined by Bill James, who is one of its pioneers and is often considered its most prominent advocate and public face.
Tyrus Raymond Cobb, nicknamed "the Georgia Peach", was an American Major League Baseball (MLB) center fielder. He was born in rural Narrows, Georgia. Cobb spent 22 seasons with the Detroit Tigers, the last six as the team's player-manager, and finished his career with the Philadelphia Athletics. In 1936, Cobb received the most votes of any player on the inaugural ballot for the National Baseball Hall of Fame, receiving 222 out of a possible 226 votes (98.2%); no other player received a higher percentage of votes until Tom Seaver in 1992. In 1999, the Sporting News ranked Cobb third on its list of "Baseball's 100 Greatest Players."
Elmer Harrison Flick was an American professional baseball outfielder who played in Major League Baseball from 1898 to 1910 for the Philadelphia Phillies, Philadelphia Athletics, and Cleveland Bronchos/Naps. In 1,483 career games, Flick recorded a .313 batting average while accumulating 164 triples, 1,752 hits, 330 stolen bases, and 756 runs batted in (RBIs). He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1963.
Napoléon "Nap" Lajoie, also known as Larry Lajoie and nicknamed "the Frenchman", was an American professional baseball second baseman and player-manager. He played in Major League Baseball (MLB) for the Philadelphia Phillies, Philadelphia Athletics (twice), and Cleveland Naps between 1896 and 1916. He managed the Naps from 1905 through 1909.
Robert Anthony Grich is an American former professional baseball player. He played in Major League Baseball (MLB) as a second baseman for the Baltimore Orioles (1970–1976) and the California Angels (1977–1986). In 1981, Grich led the American League in home runs and won a Silver Slugger Award. A six-time All-Star, he also excelled as a defensive player, winning four consecutive Gold Glove Awards between 1973 and 1976.
The 3,000-hit club is the group of 33 batters who have collected 3,000 or more regular-season hits in their careers in Major League Baseball (MLB). Reaching 3,000 hits has, "long considered the greatest measure of superior bat handling" and is often described as a guarantee of eventual entry into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
John Abraham Thorn is a German-born American sports historian, author, and publisher. Since 2011, he has served as the Official Baseball Historian for Major League Baseball.
William Reginald Armour was an American professional baseball player and manager. He was the manager of the Cleveland Bronchos in 1902 when they signed Nap Lajoie to the most lucrative contract in baseball history and the manager of the Detroit Tigers when they acquired Ty Cobb in 1905.
Tom Tango and "TangoTiger" are aliases used online by a baseball sabermetrics and ice hockey statistics analyst. He runs the Tango on Baseball sabermetrics website and is also a contributor to ESPN's baseball blog TMI . Tango is currently the Senior Database Architect of Stats for MLB Advanced Media.
John Joseph O'Connor, also known as Peach Pie, was an American utility player in Major League Baseball in the American Association, the National League, and the American League, primarily used as an outfielder. O'Connor appeared in games across four decades.
Total Sports Publishing refers to a book publishing company based in Kingston, New York, that operated from 1998 to 2002. Prominent author John Thorn served as the division's publisher throughout its existence.
The 1910 Chalmers Award was an event in the history of Major League Baseball, marking one of the first attempts to honor the sport's top players. Introduced by Hugh Chalmers, president of the Chalmers Motor Car Company, the award promised a Chalmers Model 30, a luxurious automobile, to the player with the highest batting average in the Major Leagues for the 1910 season. This initiative symbolized the emerging relationship between sports and commercial endorsements.
In baseball, batting average (BA) is determined by dividing a player's hits by their total at-bats. It is usually rounded to three decimal places and read without the decimal: A player with a batting average of .300 is "batting three-hundred". If necessary to break ties, batting averages could be taken beyond the .001 measurement. In this context, .001 is considered a "point", such that a .235 batter is 5 points higher than a .230 batter.
Gary Gillette is a baseball writer, author, and editor. He is co-editor of both the ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia and the ESPN Football Encyclopedia. For both series of books, he partnered with noted statistician Pete Palmer, as well as writers Sean Lahman and Matt Silverman.
Total Baseball is a 2,301 page baseball encyclopedia first compiled by John Thorn and Pete Palmer in 1989. By its fourth edition, Major League Baseball endorsed it as its official encyclopedia. The encyclopedia contains seasonal and career statistics in numerous categories for every Major League Baseball player, as well as historical, opinion, and year-by-year essays. Thorn wrote one of the chapters and edited the rest while Palmer, in collaboration with Thorn, provided the statistics.
The Hidden Game of Football: A Revolutionary Approach to the Game and Its Statistics is a book on American football statistics published in 1988 and written by Bob Carroll, John Thorn, and Pete Palmer. It was the first systematic statistical approach to analyzing American football in a book.
The Addie Joss Benefit Game was an exhibition baseball game played between the Cleveland Naps of the American League and an all-star team composed of players from the league's other teams at League Park in Cleveland, Ohio, on July 24, 1911. The game was planned as a benefit for the family of Addie Joss, a pitcher for the Naps who died in April. The all-stars defeated the Naps, 5–3, and the game raised $12,914 for the Joss family.
The Hidden Game of Baseball is a book by baseball statisticians John Thorn and Pete Palmer. It was published in 1984 by Doubleday and is considered to be a seminal work in the fields of sabermetrics and baseball history.
Allan Roth was a Canadian baseball and hockey statistician and an early proponent of sabermetrics in baseball. During his career, Roth worked for the Brooklyn/Los Angeles Dodgers as their official statistician from 1947 to 1964.
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