Earl Weaver, Sabermetrician

Sabermetrics lost its grandfather this week. 

Earl Weaver, who died this week at age 82, was in many ways the first sabermetrician. Weaver employed, and later elucidated, strategies now supported by voluminous research from the SABR community.

Weaver didn't know VORP or the run expectancy matrix. He had his own innate vision of the game that transcended its time.

Weaver wove his strategies, a particular human resources style and good players to a .583 winning percentage over 17 years, four pennants and a 1970 World Championship.

More specifically, Weaver was the first -- or the first to enunciate -- the following philosophy: because a team has a small and finite number of outs per game, an out is precious and avoiding outs is the key to success.

These rules were the cornerstone of his managerial career and he won 1400+ games using them:

• A home run is the fastest way to score a run.
• Obvious corollary: get players who hit home runs.
• If you play for one run, that's all you'll get.
• Obvious corollary: don't play for one run unless that's all you need.
• Conserve your 27 outs at all costs.
• Obvious corollary: on-base percentage is more important than batting average. (Put another way, walks are very important.) 
• Defense matters.

 As a result of these insights, now confirmed by objective analysis, Weaver hardly attempted a sacrifice unless the pitcher or Mark Belanger (lifetime .582 OPS) was batting. He urged his hitters to take pitches and railed at his pitchers for allowing walks. He limited steal attempts. He used his best relief pitchers in the highest-leverage situations. (To be fair, everyone did back then, but he would still be exercising that strategy even in the age of the sub-optimal bullpen paradigm.) He didn't give speedy out-makers the most opportunities to make outs by batting them at the top of his lineup.

Earl Weaver's valedictory managerial season came in 1986 -- his first and only losing season. Twenty-six years later, half of today's managers and nearly the entire cadre of reporters covering the game know less about it than he did then.