MATT WELCH WRITES ON HOW HORIZONTAL KNOWLEDGE CAME TO BASEBALL:

James had one other quality that helped make him the cranky pied piper for the “sabermetric” revolution: He actively solicited help from readers and other amateurs, and encouraged them to form parallel structures of information far superior to what Major League Baseball had to offer. This collaborative, open-source movement was an early adopter to the Internet and World Wide Web, predating and predicting such things as the modern-day explosion in Weblogs.

By the late 1980s, members of the James-organized “Project Scoresheet” (now called Retrosheet) were attending nearly every professional game, writing down minute details of each play, and sharing it in a centralized database. People started proposing new theories and formulas, engaging in brutal but collegial peer review, and buying enough James books to make him a perennial best-seller.

“All these exquisitely trained, brilliantly successful scientists and mathematicians,” Lewis writes, “were working for love, not money.”

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