Quote:
Seymour Siwoff, the statistics maven who turned the Elias Sports Bureau into the place to go for exact information on teams and athletes for more than a half-century, died Friday. He was 99.
Siwoff owned Elias for more than 70 years before selling it to his grandson in March 2018. He started as an accountant in 1938 and purchased the company in 1952.
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https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/...-owner-dies-99
Under Siwoff, the Elias Bureau attempted to monopolize the statistics market in the 1980's. When the early Sabermetricians needed data to advance their research, Siwoff was perfectly willing to share....at ruinous prices which allowed his company to control the stats market.
Showing an extraordinary foolish misunderstanding of what Sabermetrics was about, Siwoff got it into his head that the success of the Bill James Abstract was the numbers, not the conclusions which could be drawn from data analysis. The also did not understand that a great deal of the Abstract's appeal was the marvelous writing of James. With that in mind, he decided to drive Bill James out of business by stealing his customers.
That was the birth of the Elias Statistical annual, presented as a paperback the same size and shape as James' Abstract, and filled with data which he wouldn't share without charging you an arm and a leg. However, that the Elias people had no understanding of the relationship between the data and what it meant in terms of evaluating players, was manifest by the awful writing and silly, unfounded conclusions. It was full of crap like batting averages with runners on base, batting averages with runners in scoring position, batting averages in what they decided were clutch situations. Worse, they wrote up their stupid articles in a preening, self congratulatory manner, as if they believed that what they were doing really put the hammer on Bill James. There was a "Take that Bill James" attitude throughout.
They didn't get away with it. After a few years of low sales of their useless book, they ceased publication.
Siwoff may be credited with holding back advanced analysis for about a decade.
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