Trailblazing Canadian statistician, Allan Roth, one of SABR's Chadwick recipients
Late Canadian baseball statistician Allan Roth, who was born in Montreal, has been named one of SABR’s 2019 Henry Chadwick Award winners.
By Kevin Glew
Canadian Baseball Network
Trailblazing Canadian baseball statistician Allan Roth is one of SABR’s three 2019 Henry Chadwick Award recipients.
The Montreal native, who passed away in 1992, will be honoured posthumously. The other two recipients are baseball writer Rob Neyer and late diamond scribe Leonard Koppett.
The Henry Chadwick Award was established to honour the game’s great researchers — historians, statisticians, and archivists — for their invaluable contributions to making baseball the game that links America’s present with its past.
It was in 1944 that a 27-year-old Roth made a pitch to Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey about the importance of advanced statistics, such as on-base percentage. Roth also introduced Rickey to the concept of identifying how batters fared against right- and left-handed pitching. Rickey grew intrigued with the young statistician and hired him in 1947, making him the first statistician ever on a major league club’s payroll.
Roth would collect and analyze stats for the Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers until 1964. The mathematically minded Canadian recorded every pitch and wrote his stats out by hand.
“Baseball is a game of percentages,” Roth once said. “I try to find the actual percentage.”
Roth later wrote a column for The Sporting News and worked the NBC and ABC games of the week until 1990, feeding data to broadcasters such as Al Michaels and Vin Scully.
“Long before there was Mary Poppins, there was Allan Roth,” Scully once said.
For his contributions, Roth was elected to the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame posthumously in 2010. There also remains a SABR chapter named after Roth in Los Angeles.
The criteria for the SABR Henry Chadwick Award reads in part: The contributions of nominees must have had public impact. This may be demonstrated by publication of research in any of a variety of formats: books, magazine articles, websites, etc. The compilation of a significant database or archive that has facilitated the published research of others will also be considered in the realm of public impact.
You can click here for a complete list of Chadwick Award winners.