Allan Roth | |
|---|---|
 Roth in his Brooklyn office,c. 1952 | |
| Born | Abraham Roth (1917-05-10)May 10, 1917 Montreal, Quebec, Canada |
| Died | March 3, 1992(1992-03-03) (aged 74) Culver City, California, U.S. |
| Alma mater | McGill University |
| Spouse | |
| Children | 2 |
Baseball player Baseball career | |
| Statistician for theBrooklyn/Los Angeles Dodgers (1947-1964) | |
| Member of the Canadian | |
 Baseball Hall of Fame | |
| Induction | 2010 |
Allan Roth (bornAbraham Roth; May 17, 1917 – March 3, 1992) was a Canadian baseball and hockeystatistician and an early proponent ofsabermetrics in baseball. During his career, Roth worked for theBrooklyn/Los Angeles Dodgers as their official statistician from 1947 to 1964.
Roth is considered by many to be the father of modernsabermetrics. He was the first full-time statistician ever employed by aMajor League Baseball team, creating a number of new baseball statistics over the course of his work.
Roth was born inMontreal, Quebec to Jewish immigrants Rose (née Silverheart) and Nathan Roth. He was second of three children, born after his older brother Max and his younger sister Sylvia.[1]
Roth attended Strathcona Academy and, in his free time, compiled statistics for his hometownMontreal Royals of theInternational League. Additionally, he also compiled hockey statistics. He attended and graduated fromMcGill University. He would legally change his name from "Abraham" to "Allan" in 1941.[1]
In 1941, Roth was hired byFrank Calder, president of theNational Hockey League, as the official statistician of the league after he showed Calder his compiled hockey statistics. This came after he tried to find a job withLarry MacPhail, thegeneral manager of theBrooklyn Dodgers, who was uninterested in Roth's work.[1]
Three months after his work with the NHL began, however, Roth was drafted into theCanadian Army. He worked in the unit charged with organizing reinforcement contingents for Canadian Forces in Europe, where he managed all the records and statistics. In January 1944, he was discharged from the Army due toepilepsy. After being discharged, he began to write articles in the sports section of theMontreal Standard and compiled statistics for theMontreal Canadiens.[1]
In 1944, Roth met withBranch Rickey, who had replaced MacPhail as the general manager of the Dodgers, sending him a four-page letter contained proposals to track a wide range of statistics. Rickey was impressed with Roth's work and offered him a job with the Dodgers. However, visa issues afterWorld War II prevented Roth from taking up his new position until 1947.[1]
Upon taking up his new position, Roth proceeded to break down statistics into various categories such as performance against left-handers and right-handers, in the various ballparks, in situationswith runners in scoring position, and performance in differentball-strike counts.[2] At the end of each season, he would compile the numbers on each player, including his newer, advanced stats. He also spent the next eighteen seasonsrecording every pitch thrown in a Dodgers game as well as their outcome.[3]
After Rickey departed from the Dodgers, new ownerWalter O'Malley moved Roth to the press and public relations operation. As a result, his analyses and statistics began to appear regularly in the newspaper columns. Roth ran a publication calledPress Box Pickups, which contained his work as well as promotional material and was distributed in the press box during gamedays. He was also put in charge of providing statistics for the team's yearbooks andmedia guides.[1]
Initially working from behind home plate, Roth was moved to the radio booth in 1954 where he provided statistics and facts to broadcasters. He quickly struck up a friendship with Dodgers broadcasterVin Scully. From the booth, Roth also got a link to the press box and often provided statistics and analyses to reporters for their stories.[4]
After the Dodgers moved toLos Angeles, Roth began to attend spring training inVero Beach, Florida. He began to meet up with each player and would evaluate their performance from the previous year, emphasizing their strengths and weaknesses and suggesting changes to help the player improve their performance. FutureHall of Fame pitcherSandy Koufax credited Roth with helping him turn around his career through these sessions.[1]
Roth is credited with inventingon-base percentage and showing how it was more important thanbatting average. He also created an early version ofsaves forrelief pitchers in 1951. The save was adopted in 1964 and became an official statistic in 1969, both times with the help ofJerome Holtzman and with a slightly different formula than that of Roth's.[1]
Roth was fired by the Dodgers during the 1964 season after it was discovered that he was having an extramarital affair with anAfrican-American woman, when the two had a fight in the corridor of a Philadelphia hotel. O'Malley disliked controversy and, asinterracial relationships were frowned upon at the time, the press were told that Roth had resigned because he was tired of travelling. The real reason was revealed decades later byBuzzie Bavasi, Dodgers' general manager in the 1960s, in a 1994 interview.[1]
Roth continued to contribute to baseball afterwards, writing articles forThe Sporting News and editingWho's Who in Baseball. Roth also contributed statistical data for Sandy Koufax's autobiography,Koufax. In 1966, he was hired byNBC to provide statistical data to broadcastersCurt Gowdy andTony Kubek for theGame of the Week,All-Star Games and theWorld Series. A few years later, he moved toABC and provided the same service. Roth retired in the 1980s due to ill health.[1]
For his contributions to baseball, he was elected to theCanadian Baseball Hall of Fame in 2010.[5] StatisticianBill James wrote that Roth "was decades ahead of his time" and was the person who "started it all" when it came to baseball statistical analysis.[6][1] He was praised byVin Scully and sportswritersAlan Schwarz andDick Young for his groundbreaking statistical analyses.[4][7][8]
TheSociety of American Baseball Research (SABR) named their Los Angeles chapter, where he was often attended meetings and showed his new workings during the offseasons, in his honor. In 2019, they posthumously awarded him theHenry Chadwick Award for his contributions to baseball research.[9]
Roth married Esther Machlovitch in 1940. The couple had two children: a son named Michael, and a daughter named Andrea. They divorced in 1965, one year after his affair was discovered and he was fired by the Dodgers.[1]
Roth died of a heart attack in Brotman Hospital inCulver City, California on March 3, 1992.[10]
