Rickey asked that Roth send Ed Staples, his assistant, a detailed outline of Roth’s ideas. The four-page letter contained proposals to track a wide range of statistics. Some of these were standard, but others, such as where the ball was hit and the count it was hit on, hadn’t been compiled regularly. Roth also proposed to break the statistics down into various categories that would reveal tendencies which the front office and the manager could use to win ballgames. Breakdowns such as performance against left-handers and right-handers, in day games versus night games, in the various ballparks, in situations with runners in scoring position, are all mundane to us now. But in Roth’s time, they were rarely compiled or used, and never part of the public discussion. The letter was intriguing enough to get a meeting with a still-skeptical Rickey.
The conversation turned positive, Roth said, when Rickey asked him about runs batted in. Roth said he didn’t think much of runs batted in unless they were correlated with the chances to drive them in, and differentiated again by which base they’d been driven in from. This meshed with Rickey’s own beliefs and the conversation flowered. Roth was offered the job.
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In the offseason, he would refine the numbers further, seeking longer term trends and finding the outliers. Everyone knew right-handed hitters generally performed more poorly against right-handed pitchers and vice versa. Roth would look for, and find, the left-handed hitter who broke the mold and could provide a manager with an unexpected platoon advantage. He tracked bases advanced, a metric that encompassed baserunning statistics as well as the ability to move runners along with outs. He recorded what happened at each point in the count, what happened in bunting situations and differences between night and day games, home and away games, and in individual stadiums. No other team had access to such analysis at that time.
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In his first season, for example, Roth used another of his innovations—spray charts showing the location of all of a player’s batted balls—to show that Dixie Walker’s hits were going to the opposite field more and more frequently. Rickey, following his own dictum that it was better to trade a player a year too early, sent Walker to the Pirates. “The People’s Cherce” hit .316 in 1948, but was down to .282 the next year, and became a player-manager in the minors. A year after his Walker revelation, Roth’s numbers showed that in 1948, Jackie Robinson drove in a higher percentage of baserunners than any other hitter in the lineup. Manager Burt Shotton moved Robinson, who had barely broken into double digits with 12 homers, into the cleanup spot. He hit only four more home runs in 1949, but drove in 124 and won the National League Most Valuable Player Award.
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In 1954, Roth’s work hit the big time—with a heavy coating of Branch Rickey. Life magazine, one of the largest-circulation magazines in the country, ran an article titled “Goodby [sic] to Some Old Baseball Ideas.” The article said it had been written by Branch Rickey, whose picture graced the first page. Roth’s back is visible in the background of that photo, and he is pictured on the article’s third page, along with a multipart equation. That equation was clearly Roth’s work; Rickey called the equation “the most disconcerting and at the same time the most constructive thing to come into baseball in my memory.”
In many ways, “The Equation” was years ahead of its time. Its first two terms were what we today call on-base percentage and isolated power. It would take the book Moneyball half a century later to cement the importance of on-base percentage. The equation, which contained eight different terms, including pieces devoted to run-scoring efficiency, pitching, and fielding, was vastly complicated for contemporary baseball organizations.
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In looking for meaning in the numbers, Roth’s methodology was much like that of Bill James and later members of the Society for American Baseball Research: take a piece of accepted baseball wisdom and analyze whether it was true. “Some fellows have mentioned that batting average increases of 10 or 12 points would result from the sacrifice fly rule,” Roth said during a 1953 discussion of scoring rules, “The figures on the Dodgers for the last two years don’t come anywhere near such figures.”