Some people can sense earlier than others that something is being done incorrectly, that methods are amiss, that the whole thing is a sham. Brooklyn baseball fan Walter Lappe was just such a person. I knew about Bill James and Eric Walker and the Moneyball era of advanced baseball statistics that their number-crunching ushered in, but I had never heard of Lappe, who was on the same path years earlier, trying to instill science and objective reasoning into baseball. He teamed with renegade ex-pitcher Jim Bouton to publish something called The Baseball Brain, which was the first attempt by “barbarians” to crash the gate. Lappe and his stats don’t seem to have arrived at a lot of correct answers, but he was asking the right questions before others were. An excerpt from a July 1, 1974 New York magazine article that Bouton penned about their attempt to reinvent baseball:

“If I told you that some nutty baseball fan from Brooklyn held the secret for getting the Mets and Yankees into the World Series, you wouldn’t believe me. It sounds like something from Damn Yankees or like that old movie It Happens Every Spring, where Fred MacMurray or Ray Milland or somebody invents a magic substance which repels wood and when you rub it on baseballs they become unhittable. Our fan from Brooklyn doesn’t have anything that sneaky, but what he does  have could be just as revolutionary. I’ve seen his stuff, and I believe. Now, if only Yogi Berra and Bill Virdon (Mets and Yankees managers as of this writing) will read this, we’ll all be rolling in champagne and ticker tape this fall.

The fan from Brooklyn who could cause baseball’s first intra-stadium World Series is Walter Lappe (pronounced ‘Lap’), who believes that big-league managers rarely use the best strategy and players don’t seem to know what they’re doing out there. For the last 20 of his 49 years, Walter as a hobby, has been keeping his own statistics on the New York ball teams. He listens to games on the radio and writes down where each batter hits the ball, who’s pitching, balls and strikes, runners on base, weather conditions, phases of the moon, etc. Now that’s pretty nutty, but so is flying a kite in a rainstorm.

I don’t know if Benjamin Franklin has a brother, but Walter has one named Henry who is always saying, ‘Walter, why don’t you stop wasting your time listening to baseball games and go get a job, Walter?’ But how can someone get a job when you’re unlocking the secrets of the universe?”

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A 1970s ESPN Sportscenter report on Bouton’s controversial book, Ball Four. What mutton chops, what suits!