Stepping into Da Box: Alan Schwarz

Wednesday, June 08 2005 @ 04:45 PM EDT

Noted Baseball Author/Journalist to Highlight
Inaugural Box Live Chat Group Interview

As announced here last week, noted baseball statistician/author/historian Alan Schwarz will be appearing in Toronto shortly to talk about his new book, The Numbers Game: Baseball's Lifelong Fascination with Statistics. Also appearing on the bill with Schwarz will be a journeyman outfielder named Vernon something-or-other.

And as speculated during that announcement, Schwarz will be featured in the first-ever Batter's Box Live Chat group interview, this Thursday at 7:30 PM Eastern time; there is no game Thursday, so we will use the regular IRC channel and process, though it is likely that this chat will be moderated in some way; additional instructions, if necessary, will be posted to the site closer to the time of the actual chat.

To prepare for the group interview, let's use this thread to brainstorm topics and specific questions ... here are some starter points:

Batter's Box is very proud of its tradition of excellence in providing its readers with "behind the scenes" insights thanks to interviews with Toronto front office (Ricciardi, Law, others), Blue Jay players (Frasor, Bush, Gross, Lundberg, others) and coaches (Butterfield, then-coach Gibbons, others) as well as local (Baker & Griffin, Campbell, Wilner, others) and national (Sickels, Neyer, Verducci, others) media personalities. This new chat-function "group interview" is a real step toward putting some meaning in the "Interactive" part of this site's Batter's Box Interactive Magazine moniker.

Now what do we want to ask Schwarz?

• Schwarz's personal Web site, which among other things, features this excerpt from his personal biography:
  Alan Schwarz, who writes The New York Times' "Keeping Score" column every two weeks, has covered baseball for the past 15 years, working for many of the most respected publications in sports media. Since 1991, he has been the Senior Writer of Baseball America magazine. He has written a weekly in-season column for ESPN.com since 2001 and contributed essays and book reviews to The New York Times since 1998.
• Just in the last couple of days, for the many amateur draftniks out there among Bauxites, Schwarz wrote both From A-Rod ... to a guy named Chilcott and Ryan, Bonds, Beltran have something in common -- so clearly, your questions can run more topical to the draft if you wish, but keep in mind that he is not likely prepared to comment on individual prospects.
• Twice, Schwarz's book has reached #1 on the sports list of the vaunted Amazon.com bestseller list. The Amazon.com page for the book features a number of excerpted reviews, including the following:
  Publisher's Weekly: " ... intelligent, smartly researched and often hilarious look at the use of statistics in baseball, which Schwarz definitively shows to 'date back to the game's earliest days in the 19th century.' It will delight any fan who memorizes the numbers on the back of trading cards or pores over newspaper box scores. The book's success is rooted in its focus on the people 'obsessed with baseball's statistics ever since the box score started it all in 1845,' rather than being about the statistics themselves.

  Verducci: "The language of baseball is statistics, and Alan Schwarz gives us an unprecedented look at one of the world's great romance languages. Schwarz deftly illuminates the history and relevance of baseball statistics and is at the top of his game introducing the people behind the numbers. The cast is an eclectic mix of baseball linguists, including an alcoholic pack rat, a military strategist and one of Albert Einstein's faculty colleagues. You don't need a slide rule or pocket protector to appreciate the tales Schwarz has unearthed -- gems such as Babe Ruth's long lost 715th home run abound -- but you will become more fluent in baseball."

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