The man who founded Baseball Prospectus, who created a book that became a website that helped revolutionize an industry, no longer watches baseball. He can’t.
A spinal injury robbed Gary Huckabay first of his ability to walk, then of his eyesight and finally of his passion for the sport. He tried listening to games on the radio, but it wasn’t the same.
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More than 25 years ago, Huckabay was at the center of one of baseball’s great underdog tales: “Revenge of the Nerds” meets “Major League,” with a little National Lampoon mixed in. Analytical, irreverent and opinionated, Baseball Prospectus became, as one former employee said, the “Saturday Night Live” of sabermetrics, a launching pad for talented outsiders. Today, more than 50 former Baseball Prospectus alums litter front offices, including Chaim Bloom, the chief baseball officer of the Boston Red Sox. Each postseason is a reminder of how far the sport has come. James Click, a former BP employee, won a World Series in October as general manager of the Houston Astros. The Atlanta Braves built a champion with two former Prospectus writers in key R&D roles (Colin Wyers and Mike Fast). As did the 2015 Kansas City Royals (Mike Groopman), the 2016 Chicago Cubs (Jason Parks) and the 2017 Houston Astros (Wyers, Fast and Kevin Goldstein).
“To call it a website is really not doing it justice,” A’s president Billy Beane said. “It was really a think tank.”
“I think it opened the intellectual side of the game,” said Yankees assistant general manager Michael Fishman.
“They’re foundational to what has happened over the last 25 years in baseball,” said Twins president Derek Falvey.
Huckabay, now 57, started Baseball Prospectus to prove there was a better, smarter way to run a team. So much of his life back then centered on the sport. He played and managed in semi-pro leagues, consumed books and crunched numbers, and disappeared for hours into online forums, where he read and argued and bonded with strangers he came to admire (and a few he called “chowderheads”).
That’s gone, too.
“I’ve never really had a large number of friends, mostly because I worked so much,” he says. “But that hit has actually been profound. Yeah. I miss it horribly.”
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He once created an entire projection system named Vladimir, in honor of his favorite pizza place, that forecast every hitter in baseball. Now he cannot tell you one player on one team.
“Not a single one,” he says.
In the days before the internet reached the rest of America, a group of posters on a baseball discussion group came up with an acronym to describe the misfits and quants who filled their ranks: SDCNs — Stat Drunk Computer Nerds.
A SDCN was a baseball fan who venerated on-base percentage and hated sacrifice bunts, who probably had a couple of Bill James books on the shelf and would go to war with anyone who overvalued fielding percentage. The term was supposed to be a pejorative, but it was soon a badge of honor, which made it the perfect description for Gary Huckabay.
“They also detest the idea of pitcher wins,” Huckabay once wrote, “and generally dress poorly.”
A graduate student at UC Davis, Huckabay played semi-pro baseball in the Sacramento Valley League, held a campus job running the university’s Scantron machines, did stand-up comedy for $10 a gig and argued about baseball on an early-internet discussion group at Rec.Sport.Baseball, part of the Usenet system, a proto-Reddit.
Once Huckabay realized he could write three lines of code to automate the Scantron results, he spent some of his time on the clock reading Rec.Sport.Baseball. “Oh, gosh, I don’t want to make it sound too bad,” he says, “but it was no more than 97 or 98 percent of my time.”
Rec.Sport.Baseball became Huckabay’s neighborhood coffee shop, a community of future scientists, engineers, dermatologists, lawyers who would argue before the Supreme Court and an oddly large number of guys named Dave. It was a place where Huckabay mingled with fans from Tokyo and heard the name Ichiro seven years before he debuted in Seattle, where posters published their own research projects and waited for peer review. People didn’t just discuss slugger Rob Deer; they wrote odes to the patron saint of walks, strikeouts and dingers, or, as an r.s.b poster originally christened them, “The Three True Outcomes.”
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Huckabay was one of the ringleaders, combining statistical analysis with biting humor. He identified himself as Gary “Flannel is a Religion” Huckabay and explained the term Fat Butt to newcomers: “Legendary power hitting first baseman with a donut addiction.” He talked up his playing exploits, once posting about playing six games in one day. (His scouting report: “Defense so horrid they won’t even look at me. My bat was my calling card”). And when an A’s fan put their season-tickets up for sale and noted they included the option to buy postseason tickets should Oakland make it, Huckabay couldn’t resist a shot at his favorite team: “Also included is a toasty space heater, in case Hell freezes over.”
“He was just a very smart, very funny writer,” said Rany Jazayerli, who found Huckabay on Rec.Sport.Baseball. “But he had some really good ideas.”
Through Rec.Sport.Baseball, Huckabay came to detest the baseball establishment. It wasn’t just that he disagreed with many of their views, although he did; it was that so many people in the sport defended those views without ever investigating them. “That kind of behavior bugs the hell out of me,” he says. “It gets under my skin.”
That comes from a simple place. His mom.
Susan Redmond was a violinist at 18 when a car accident sent her through the windshield and cut the tendons in her left hand. Unable to play, she went to work at Aerojet in Sacramento and worked her way up. “Every job she ever had, she was just absolutely slaughtered by sexism,” Huckabay says. “Her work was very often misappropriated by others who did not put in the work that she did.” She later was a metrology engineer at a chemical company, but the story was always the same. Huckabay developed a hatred for businesses that made decisions for no other reason than ignorance.
After years on Rec.Sport.Baseball, Huckabay had enough. He knew baseball was wrong. Now it was time to prove it. “I wanted the fight,” he says. As Huckabay read the prose and research produced by strangers on Rec.Sport.Baseball, he became convinced: These people could write a great book.
In the fall of 1995, he started to assemble a team.
The first person Huckabay contacted was Clay Davenport, a former environmental science student at the University of Virginia whose grad work had been put on hold as he worked through mental health struggles. Davenport, a self-described “hard-core numbers guy,” had taken Bill James’ idea of “minor-league equivalencies” — how minor-leaguers might translate to the majors — and expanded it, allowing him to project major-league production for every player in the minors, all the way down to A-ball.
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Huckabay also connected with Christina Kahrl, a history graduate student in Chicago who worked at a press that specialized in archaeology books. Kahrl had grown up on a horse ranch outside Sacramento and never played organized baseball. “So my childhood was shoveling shit and reading the newspaper,” she said. But she loved the vigorous debate on Rec.Sport.Baseball, and Huckabay enjoyed the way she slipped in references to the classics.
Rany Jazayerli was a medical student at Michigan who had grown up in Kansas and spent part of his childhood in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, which made him unsure if anyone was as consumed with baseball as he was. Then he found Rec.Sport.Baseball and Joe Sheehan, a journalism student at USC. Jazayerli and Sheehan argued for hours on the phone, racking up long-distance charges, their copies of Total Baseball flipped open. To Jazayerli and Sheehan, the name Gary Huckabay meant something, even though they only knew him from his posts. So when Huckabay reached out, Jazayerli lobbied for Sheehan as well.
“Gary, he’s got a journalism degree,” Jazayerli told Huckabay.
“Well, let’s not hold it against him.”
The mission was simple: To create the book the five of them wanted to read. Huckabay’s first advertisement on Rec.Sport.Baseball promised statistical projections, previews of each team and “The Frozen Severed Head of Walt Disney,” all for $20.15, plus shipping and handling. Some 200 brave souls mailed checks to Sheehan, then a few months into a job at a small legal publisher. With his wealth of experience, Sheehan was put in charge of design, proofing and editing, tasks that consumed his nights and weekends for three months.
Two days after Sheehan shipped the first BP, he got a call from Huckabay.
“Great book, man,” Huckabay said. “Sorry about the Cardinals.”
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“What?” Sheehan asked.
He pulled out a copy and thumbed through it, looking for pages 415 to 434. Yep. He had forgotten the chapter about the St. Louis Cardinals.
Amazingly, the screw-up led to a fortuitous creation. The group needed some place to put the missing 15 pages, so Huckabay enlisted Dave Pease, a Rec.Sport.Baseball poster and engineer at Qualcomm, to build the first version of BaseballProspectus.com. The internet then was still an unpopulated frontier. When the Baseball Prospectus site went live on October 2, 1996, one of the biggest baseball websites on the internet was “John Skilton’s Baseball Links.”
“You might as well have been talking about your jetpack,” Sheehan said.
Huckabay pleaded with his co-authors to do a second book — though one thing did bother him. “The name,” he wrote on Rec.Sport.Baseball. “It’s awful.” But when the second book sold a thousand copies or so — five times more than the original — there it was again: “Baseball Prospectus ‘97.”
The group kept mining the talent at Rec.Sport.Baseball. Keith Law, a Harvard grad (and now an Athletic senior writer), started to contribute, as did Keith Woolner, an MIT grad who had refined a new statistic — Value Over Replacement Player, or VORP, a precursor to WAR. The group finished the third book for the 1998 season, 520 pages in all, published by Brassey’s, a real publisher, albeit one that usually focused on military history.
When the third book sold 3,000 copies, it felt like a turning point.
The early books contained ideas that now seem commonplace but didn’t back then: On-base percentage is more important than batting average; young pitchers shouldn’t throw as many pitches; the prime years of a player’s career are earlier than the conventional wisdom has it; OPS is the best offensive measuring stick. “The dominant thought process in the game today is basically what they were writing 25 years ago,” Billy Beane said.
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As Baseball Prospectus pushed more resources to its website in the early 2000s, it found one loyal reader in the A’s front office. In the years before Michael Lewis’ seminal book “Moneyball” — before the A’s methods were revealed to the rest of the world — Beane would wake up at 4 a.m., use a DSL internet connection to load the Baseball Prospectus site, read the latest column about some sabermetric idea and have a paranoid thought: “They’re bugging our office.”
In the years before the analytics vs. scout war migrated from Rec.Sport.Baseball to the mainstream, Beane read Baseball Prospectus and sensed the righteous anger that colored the arguments. “It would come out in this wicked sense of humor,” he said.
It was exactly what Huckabay wanted. He was adamant that analytics be packaged with jokes, that the product harness the tone of Rec.Sport.Baseball and that each idea be conveyed with, as Sheehan said, a “spoonful of snark.”
Bill James’ books in the 1980s were conceived in the same spirit. But whereas James’ style might be described as traditional American humorist, Mark Twain rhapsodizing about Dale Murphy, the early days of BP leaned savage, in the image of Huckabay. “I’ll actually use the words that I was thinking,” Huckabay said. “How f—ing stupid are these people?”
It wasn’t unusual for Huckabay to insert three or four jokes into a writer’s copy. The group followed his lead, employing what Kahrl called the “Douglas Adams approach,” after for the British humorist, meaning an essay on a young prospect could turn into a gag about Rob Deer or a diatribe on the meaning of life. The arguments weren’t for everyone. Then, as now, critics thought BP’s emphasis on data was ruining the game. But Beane, among others, kept reading. In 2002, when A’s executive J.P. Ricciardi left to become the general manager of the Blue Jays, Beane told Ricciardi — a former scout — that he should hire someone with a background in quantitative analysis. Beane recommended Keith Law from Baseball Prospectus, the first alum to crack an MLB front office.
And yet BP was in trouble. The website had become a massive burden. People were stretched too thin, writing analysis, editing copy, all while working day jobs with little in the way of compensation. Huckabay did not want to see Baseball Prospectus fall into mediocrity. So in the winter of 2002, he wondered aloud:
Would it be better just to kill the whole thing?
Around the same time, Huckabay received a 15-page document from another old acquaintance from Rec.Sport.Baseball, a transfer pricing consultant in Chicago. That was not unusual. Once a week a college student or quant sent Huckabay a statistical analysis or study, hoping to catch his eye. Huckabay no longer had time to read them all, so he’d flip through a few pages, become disinterested and set them aside. But right away he realized this one was different.
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The document outlined a new projection system that would spit out numbers for pitchers based on past performance from every player in MLB history. Huckabay called a friend and asked for advice:
“What do you do when you run into somebody who knows way more than you do, puts it on paper and you don’t know enough to actually evaluate it?”
Huckabay found his answer. He needed to hire this guy.
Nate Silver was 24 years old when he sent Huckabay his projection system. Silver had grown up in Michigan and studied economics at the University of Chicago, spending his senior year battling a major case of senioritis.
Silver took a job at KPMG, but the work didn’t challenge him, so he crunched baseball statistics in Microsoft Excel to save himself from total boredom. (That same impulse led him, in the runup to the 2008 election, to launch a boutique political website, FiveThirtyEight, where his electoral prognostication made him an overnight sensation).
When Huckabay finished reading the proposal, he sent back a suggestion: Why don’t you do one for hitters as well?
“That period in my life was responsible for everything that came afterward,” Silver said.
His system became PECOTA — the Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm — a garble of words to fit the last name of Bill Pecota, a light-hitting infielder for the Royals. It turned out to be just what Baseball Prospectus needed. Huckabay had kicked around the idea of a premium subscription on the website, a chance to actually make some money. PECOTA was exactly the premium product that Huckabay wanted to put behind a paywall. Huckabay bought PECOTA in exchange for equity in the company, offered Silver the title of executive vice president, then launched the system and paywall in 2003.
When thousands of people signed up, blowing away expectations, Baseball Prospectus also found it needed something else:
Interns.
A few months later, Huckabay walked into a Round Table Pizza restaurant in the Bay Area, where he was hosting a “pizza feed” for readers. The audience at those Q&A events usually leaned older, but Huckabay could not escape the shadow of a 24-year-old Yale graduate who looked like one of Huckabay’s friends from junior high.
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“He was one tenacious bastard,” Huckabay says.
James Click had spent the previous few years cold-calling MLB teams, sending out his resume and applying for internships, though nothing had come of it. At the pizza feed, Click sought out Huckabay. Their conversation turned into an argument about a particular pitcher that Click was higher on than Huckabay. Huckabay prodded Click with questions, trying to get to the root of their disagreement. Finally, he found it. Huckabay believed a pitcher needed at least three pitches to start, and Click did not.
“You combine the critical thinking skills with that personality and it could be intoxicating, honestly, being around him,” Click said.
Click showed up at another pizza feed a few weeks later. Huckabay let slip that the new Baseball Prospectus website was a little behind schedule. Click stuck around after the event, re-introduced himself and told Huckabay his day job was web design and database construction. Huckabay gave Click his card and told him to call in a few weeks. Click called two days later.
“I was like, ‘Yeah, that’s fine. Whatever you want to do,’” Huckabay said. “’You don’t seem to understand this. We don’t have an office, you’re not going to have a salary, you’re going to be working from home and you’re going to find out there’s as much work to do as either you want to do or don’t want to do.’”
Click’s work was tedious, mostly focused on making sure PECOTA numbers were entered correctly, but he found his boss fascinating. Huckabay had lightning quick wit, a vast knowledge of the most random topics and the critical thinking skills to get to the heart of a problem and find a solution. He was also hilarious. Click had to confess to his mother that a joke about Julianna Margulies in one of his stories was actually written by Huckabay.
“Rather than use his humor to put people down,” Click wrote in an email, “he used it to put people at ease, to keep things light and loose even when the discussions were heated. It’s something I’ve carried with me and done my best to emulate.”
Baseball Prospectus did for Click what all the cold calls could not. Two years after meeting Huckabay at the pizza feed, Click joined the Tampa Bay Rays.
Soon Huckabay and others realized something funny: They had created a product that spent most of its bandwidth telling baseball executives how stupid they were, and now those same executives were coming back to Baseball Prospectus to find employees.
In 2004, when Beane was looking for a replacement for lieutenant Paul DePodesta, he posted the job on BP, confident the readership would provide the right candidates. Beane eventually hired a BP reader and MIT graduate named Farhan Zaidi, who earned his PhD in behavioral economics from Cal-Berkeley. Today Zaidi runs the San Francisco Giants. The floodgates opened. Chaim Bloom joined Click at the Rays. Keith Woolner eventually joined the Cleveland Indians. And Beane hired Huckabay as a consultant.
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Huckabay had grown up an A’s fan. During the 1981 strike, Rickey Henderson had worked out at Huckabay’s high school and driven Huckabay and his friends to the batting cage. Henderson was even a small part of why he started BP: He’d become tired of having to defend Henderson’s offensive production from fans who didn’t understand ballpark factors. Now he was on the A’s payroll.
But Huckabay could not change. When the A’s traded pitchers Mark Redman and Arthur Rhodes in November 2004 to the Pirates for 31-year-old catcher Jason Kendall, Huckabay was outraged — and let Beane know it. Kendall was owed more than $10 million for the 2005 season, far more than Huckabay thought he was worth.
“We can’t do this,” he remembers telling Beane. “We don’t have the resources to be this stupid.”
He knew then he wasn’t long for the job: “After that meeting, I was like, ‘You know, I wonder if my resume is shaped up. Maybe I’ll check it over.’”
He went to work for Wells Fargo, where he stayed for a decade. “You know those credit card solicitations you get every month?” he says. “Yes, they’re from me. And you’re welcome.”
Then, on Halloween in 2016, he took a step on his front porch and his whole life changed.
It started as an old baseball injury. Back in the mid ‘90s, around the same time he dreamed up the idea for Baseball Prospectus, Huckabay was playing in one of his semi-pro leagues. He was in centerfield, the big tight end from the UC Davis football team was in left. Huckabay had a read on a fly ball. He tracked it, called for it and…
Next thing he knew he was on his back, the big tight end standing over his face, asking if he was OK. Huckabay’s neck hurt, right at the base of his head, but he took Tylenol and after a couple weeks the pain went away.
A decade passed. He kept working. One day in 2005, he experienced numbness in his toes, then his feet. Eventually it hurt to walk. He went to the doctor, who told him his blood pressure was a little high. But the numbness and pain continued to spread.
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On Halloween 2016, he walked onto his front porch and fell over. The doctor at the hospital showed him his X-rays. His third vertebrae looked “like Pompeii.” His fourth vertebrae was worse, like “coarse powder.” The doctor told him he’d been living with a “time bomb” ever since that outfield collision. He spent three months in the hospital. Then came surgery and all the challenges he faces today. Three days a week he goes to dialysis, near his home in California’s East Bay, hooked up to a machine for hours. He lost part of his hearing in his right ear, and then, a couple months ago, temporarily lost all hearing in his left. Every day is “pretty much relentless fucking awful.”
“Most importantly,” Huckabay says, “I didn’t make the catch.”
Huckabay’s influence lives on, through Baseball Prospectus and the people he worked with. The site has changed hands over the years, and the original founders are gone. But Huckabay still means something to all of them. Jazayerli balances a part-time career as a writer with a dermatology practice. Davenport holds a management position at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Sheehan and Kahrl both still work in journalism.
“If not for Gary,” says Kahrl, who made the “SNL” comparison, “I would probably be a history professor teaching people about the Diet of Worms. Effectively dozens of people in baseball today owe Gary Huckabay their careers.”
One of those people is James Click, who in October won a World Series as the general manager of the Astros before parting ways with the organization in November. Click was the first BP alum to claim a world championship as a GM, the first to stand on a stage and watch MLB commissioner Rob Manfred hand over the trophy. In the days after the final game, Click thought of the sliding door moments that led him there. What if I’d gotten one of those MLB internships instead of working at BP?
He has no clue, but he does know he was there, on that stage, because Huckabay took a chance on him in the back of a pizza place all those years ago. Like most of the other BP originals, Click hasn’t seen Huckabay in years. Life happens. People drift apart, but their connection doesn’t just end, a legacy greater than any book or website.
Maybe, Click says, this is a good chance to reconnect.
(Top image: Samuel Richardson / The Athletic; Photos: iStock)