DICTIONARY DEFINITIONS
Bill James, preeminent baseball writer and Sabermetrician, coined the word Sabermetrics in 1980. He wanted to give a name to the work he had been doing for his readers, and he wrote in his annual book on baseball analytics, The 1980 Baseball Abstract:
“…what I do does not have a name and cannot be explained in a sentence or two. Well, now I have given it a name: Sabermetrics … [and] Sabermetrics is the mathematical and statistical analysis of baseball records.”
Obviously the word caught on (we have designed SABR101x around the subject area!), and Bill will always be remembered for his word, among his other important contributions to the field of Sabermetrics. In fact, in June 2007, the Oxford English Dictionary included the word among its new entries – the word was finally legit.
But what exactly is Sabermetrics? Like any good science course we should begin with defining our terms at the start of study, so that we can be consistent in our definitions. So let’s survey what various dictionaries have to say about the word (all accessed online in March 2014):
Oxford English Dictionary:
The application of statistical analysis to baseball records, especially in order to evaluate and compare the performance of individual players.
Merriam-Webster Dictionary:
the statistical analysis of baseball data
sa·ber·me·tri·cian (How to pronounce the word: http://goo.gl/c1fS7B)
Origin of sabermetrics: saber- (from SABR: Society for American Baseball Research) + -metrics (as in econometrics)
First Known Use: 1982
American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language:
The analysis of quantitative categories to evaluate the requirements for overall team success and the specific effectiveness of individual players in meeting those requirements.
Sabermetrics often employs more complex statistical categories than those used in traditional baseball statistics.
Please read these definitions carefully and compare them to the original one by Bill James.