Issue #5 - Part I, August 2013


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** Interview with John Dewan  **
      (Telephone interview conducted by our member Chris Witt with Mr. Dewan who is the President of
       Baseball Info Solutions)

(Notes from the Wolfman: First of all we wish to thank Chris Witt for his help in be able to setup a time to interview John Dewan, who as all of you can imagine is a very busy guy. Chris did a great job conducting this long awaited interview. For those of you who may not know who Mr. Dewan is, (even though he is one of us, a die-hard Strat Baseball gamer) he is one of the main creator of Stats Inc., which began a whole new trend in how statistics are kept for Major League Baseball. After selling Stats, Inc. away, he and his group started the existing company Baseball Info Solutions (BIS). Also I dare say, Mr. Dewan was of great assistance in indirectly helping to make Strat-o-matic Baseball one of the most realistic baseball simulation games on the planet. Well I will let him explain about this a bit more in his interview!

Further, I didn't realize that I had met John before. In my younger days, when I lived in Chicago in the late 70's and early 80s, we use to have our own face-to-face baseball leagues of which Bud Podrazik and his brother were members.  For you see John and Bud participated in our last National Convention we organized at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL in 1980. But of course this was before John and his associates created Stats Inc. I think Bud did well in one of the 1980 tournaments and Bud is still involved in a baseball league that John is playing in (more details in his interview). But Bud has a special distinction too in the history of strato that we will being sharing more at a future time. In any case, we are so excited to be able to share this interview with a legend, a man who has shaped the world of Baseball Statistics forever. Welcome John to the Ultimate Strat Baseball Newsletter!!)

 

Chris:  I am on the phone with John Dewan, the owner of Baseball Info Solutions. For those who don't already know, John has totally revolutionized and changed the way that baseball statistics are tracked and used, first with his  work at STATS, Inc., and now more recently with Baseball Info Solutions. John, I know you are really busy, and on behalf of the "Wolfman" and all the readers of the Ultimate Strat Baseball Newsletter, I just want to say thanks for giving us your time. John Dewan:  Well, I appreciate it. It's a pleasure for me to talk about Strat-O-Matic. Chris:  All right. Let's jump in then. The first question we have for you is: When you were younger, did you always enjoy sports, and was baseball your favorite sport? John Dewan: Yes. Baseball was always was my favorite. It started when my dad began to take me to ball games on the south side of Chicago. My favorite event of the year was "Bat Day Double Header" at Comiskey Park. That's how I got my baseball equipment each year. I got my bat for the year and I was good to go!

Chris:  That was one of my original questions that I was going to ask. I thought I had remembered you were a White Sox fan.

John Dewan:  Growing up on the South Side - can't help it normally.  Gotta get my White Sox fix on a regular basis.

Chris:  Did you play any ball when you were younger?

John Dewan:  I played a couple years of Little League ball. Not too much. I kind of regretted that I didn't play more. But we did have a neighborhood softball team. We played other teams in the area, so we played a fair amount of softball.  We also played another type of baseball game. It was called "fast pitching" on the south side, where you would take a rubber ball and you draw a chalk square, and you'd mark off 60 feet. You'd play baseball with just two guys - a pitcher and a batter. And the idea was to strike out the hitter or walk him. (Those were) the two most common events. We pitchers were ahead of the hitters normally, and the hitters would occasionally get hits. We would have a good time playing that game.

Chris:  That's funny - my Dad was born in '44. He grew up maybe a mile west of Wrigley and every time we drive through his old neighborhood, he tells me the exact same story that he used to play this game as well.

John Dewan:  Yep. Sometimes it's called it "Strike Em' Out," but we called it "Fast Pitching" on the south side.

Chris:  All right, who were some of your favorite baseball players that you followed?

John Dewan: Well, probably one of the more interesting stories was Floyd Robinson with the White Sox in the 60's. He had a string of seasons where he hit .300, and then there were a couple of times when he didn't hit .300. And I had this theory that he needed only to hit 11 home runs, because then he would hit .300. And if he hit more than 11 home runs - which he did on a couple of occasions (he got 13 and hit .283 one year), I was disappointed.  I wanted him to hit .300, as I was a big believer in what they were telling me about how important it is to hit for a high average. 

Chris:  And now we're more into on-base percentage, of course.

John Dewan:  In fact, it was the game of Strat-O-Matic that taught me about the importance of on-base percentage. 

Chris:  That is actually the next question up, here. Can you tell us a little bit about how you first became involved with Strat-O-Matic?

John Dewan:  The first baseball board game I had was called Baseball Strategy. It was basically generic players, and each team would have the same players, and you would compete against each other. And somehow I lost the game, and I thought "I have to get another board game". Then I saw the advertisement in the Sporting News for Strat-O-Matic Baseball, and I sent away for the brochure. It came in the mail, (this was 1969) and it had the 1968 Willie Horton card as a sample in the brochure.

So I wanted to test the realism of this game, and the Willie Horton card had a home run on 1-8, 1-9 and 1-10. He had something like 512 at bats that year and 36 homers. So, I thought, well I am going to throw the dice 512 times and see how many homers I got - and I got exactly 36 homers.

Then I said "this is the game for me!" (Chris: There you go!)  So, that was my turning point: running to the store with mom's money, and getting the money order to mail it into Strat-O-Matic and getting the game.

Chris:  Did Strat-O-Matic play any role later on in your career path, do you think? 

John Dewan:  Well, it played a huge role, actually. When the game came in - I remember I was home when the truck pulled up with the game - I knew where all the kids in the neighborhood were: they were over at the school playing basketball. So I ran over to the school where they were playing, and I said, "Hey, the new game came in!" And everybody ran over to my house, and we started playing Strat-O-Matic. And I had the nickname of "Bowie Dewan" (named after the commissioner of baseball, Bowie Kuhn), and I ran the Strat-O-Matic league. We had a great time playing the 1968 season - it was all pitching.  We didn't know what homers were like, as they were pretty rare.

The game really paved the way for my absolute love of the game. I already enjoyed going to games, but playing Strat absolutely solidified my love of statistics and numbers. It really was the launching point for my career in baseball. It was the launching point that inspired me to become a math major in college.

In high school, I decided it was my goal to become the statistician of the White Sox. Honestly, I owe a lot to having played the game of Strat-O-Matic. I owe a lot to Hal Richman and all the guys over at Strat-O-Matic who developed and made that game successful. I loved it. I played it. I still play it to this day.

I've been in the same league since 1975.  So we've been playing coming up on, what is that? 40 years. (Chris: That's the kind of math you don't want to do.) Well, it's kind of funny, because I'm only 29 years old (ha ha).

Chris:  So can you tell the readers a little bit about STATS, Inc.?

John Dewan:  Absolutely. STATS started in a bedroom in my house. In fact, the very room I'm sitting in right now is the room where the second incarnation of STATS got started (1985). There was an original company that folded, and then we restarted STATS beginning with my wife and myself, and a guy by the name of Dick Cramer, and a guy that a lot of the readers will know by the name of Bill James.

So the four of us were really the first group that started STATS, Inc. It started in a bedroom in my house. My wife and I left our full time jobs to devote full time to STATS. And it just grew and grew. It was basically a company where we decided our goal was to do the things in baseball that we enjoyed, develop the publications that we enjoyed, and provide information that we would want ourselves. And it just grew and grew; every year we moved into a bigger office - got out of the bedroom into a one room office, into a four room office, into a regular office with windows. We kept growing and growing. It was a lot of fun!

Chris:  Was there the thought at all early on that, "Hey, there's a market for this, and this can be profitable," or was it more "this is something we want to do because we would enjoy it, and if it works out - great - and, if not, we gave it a shot?"

John Dewan:  It was more of the latter.  We thought it would work, and I felt that we could make a living at it. I had left my career. I was a Fellow in the Society of Actuaries and I loved working in the insurance business. But as I have said many times, sports numbers are way more fun than insurance numbers. So when we started working on sports numbers, it was a lot of fun. And we just believed that we could make a living, and we became quite successful - especially when we sold STATS to Rupert Murdoch and his group over at Fox. STATS has continued (after our sale to them) to become a worldwide entity involved with statistical collection of information. They are doing great.

I still wanted to be involved, so we started a company called Baseball Info Solutions that specialized solely in baseball, and that's been very successful in the last ten years as we worked with quite a few (professional baseball) teams and media customers, and Strat-O-Matic continues to be a customer of Baseball Info Solutions.

Chris:  Can you tell the readers what kind of services that Baseball Info Solutions offers to the SOM game company?

John Dewan:  Basically everything that they need to make the baseball game work. Things like lefty-righty statistics, and defensive analytics, and even just all the basic statistics that go into it. SOM has to rate all the players, so we have to help them with the bunt ratings. We give them some analytical tools for analyzing bunting and analyzing hit and run, analyzing the catchers ability to throw out runners. Everything that they need in order to do their ratings is a big part of what we provide.

Chris:  I have often wondered where the game company's bunting and hit and run ratings came from, so that sheds a little light upon it.

John Dewan:  It's not all pure statistically based.  They also get subjective ratings from baseball experts as well. 

Chris:  I thought I read once that you were part of the "klatch," as they called it, that gets together to help determine fielding ratings and things like that.

John Dewan:  I did get involved for a couple of years.  They are using our analytics.  They continue to do a great job.  So I am occasionally involved, but not as often as I used to be.

Chris:  For someone who has now been playing the baseball game for 40 years or so, as you shared with us before, are there any tips you might share with our readers that may help them to be more successful with their SOM baseball teams?

John Dewan:  Well I will give you an example. As I told you before, I was a big believer in batting average, and how I was spoon-fed this by announcers of baseball games back in the late 60's. We started a league in 1972, and I drafted my team purely on batting average. And I quickly found that my team did not do well. The teams that had walks and homers really were the teams that were successful. Right then and there, I developed my own formula for analyzing the Strat-O-Matic baseball cards.

I actually calculated the probabilities on the card for singles and doubles and walks and homers and everything on the card. And I came up with a formula that combined batting average, on-base percentage, and slugging percentage. As a result, my teams started doing much better. So the modern formula of OPS is really basically the formula that I developed on my own. I've been using that since the 70's for evaluating my Strat-O-Matic teams. The key for me, when playing Strat-O-Matic, is to look at the Strat-O-Matic cards themselves and the probabilities.  Also, there are different analytical reports that Strat-O and various entities have put together that provide you with the probabilities against lefties and the probabilities against righties for both hitters and pitchers. That is probably the central most key (strategies), which most Strat-O players at this point probably have a pretty good handle on.

Chris:  Is there a high expectation for you in your league where people say, "You're John Dewan! How can you not win this league every year?!"

John Dewan:  (Laughs) Well I have to admit that I do pretty well in our league.  Since we started in '75, I've probably won more championships than anyone else. Now my son (Jason) is in it, and last year we literally came down to the very last game of the year, and whoever won that last game between my son and I would win the league. Jason is now 22 years old. I started playing Strat-O-Matic with him when he was about 5.  We started out playing the dice game.

So he grew up playing Strat-O-Matic, and now he is a Strat-O lover. So it was really cool this last season, when it came down to the very last game of the season.  And I retained the title (laughs). (Chris: No mercy!) I still try to beat him.  Actually, when he was younger, I didn't try to beat him, but I definitely try to beat him now.

(Chris: Ya, it's like "You're grown up.  It's time. We're going to be real now!")

That's right.  He beats me in fantasy baseball, though, so he knows his stuff.

Chris:  Is there anything else you want to share with our readers that you think would be of interest for them that is linked with Strat-O-Matic?

John Dewan:  I think I've gotten in most of my stories in. Strat-O-Matic has been absolutely key and central in my life, and it's been key and central in my career, so I owe a lot to Strat-O-Matic. And as all your readers know, it's a lot of fun. 

Chris:  Yes. Finally, how would you like to be remembered for your contributions to baseball?

John Dewan:  Oh my gosh! That's a huge question! Well, "a pioneer in the development of baseball analytics and real-time..." Um, let's see - how do I want to say that?  You got me going...  Let's just say, "a baseball analytics pioneer."  There you go!

Chris:  Simple and to the point. I like it. Finally, John if people want to get in touch with you, what is the best way to do so (email, facebook)? Also what is the website for Baseball Info Solutions?

John Dewan:  The website for Baseball Info Solutions is www.baseballinfosolutions.com.  The best place to follow my work is called John Dewan's Stat of the Week at StatOfTheWeek.com.  I also have a twitter account as well called @FieldingBible where people can follow my work including Stat of the Week. 

Chris:  Thanks so much for your time. I know you are a busy guy, and Joshua and all our readers really appreciate this. Thanks so much John!