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Ari Kaplan has made his life in sports, but he has never been
paid for playing the game. In the late 1980s, Kaplan was a
college student at the California Institute of Technology
(Caltech). He was on the baseball team, but knew he did not
have a major-league future . . . or so he thought. At Caltech,
he studied math and computer science. That knowledge,
combined with a lifelong love of baseball, put him on a
different path. It all started when he thought about something
concerning the statistics of baseball that had bothered him for
a few years.
“As a [NewYork]Mets’ fan, I remember some of the pitchers,
from watching the games, seemed to have good
ERA
s,” Kaplan
recalls. “I wondered how, if a
relief pitcher
came into the game
with the bases loaded and allowed three runs to score, it could
show ‘0’ runs allowed at the end of the box score? Why does he
have a zero if he let in three runs?
“It was just common sense to me, from watching the
game, that did not seem accurate. I came up with a way to more
effectively describe what a pitcher does. That was basically what
it was. I saw a relief pitcher blow a game, saw that his ERA
was 0.00 for that game, and I said, ‘That doesn’t make sense.’
Everything else sprouted from that.”
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