I’ve posted about some pre-Beane baseball theorists who never had Brad Pitt play them in a film. There was Walter Lappe, who sensed that something was wrong with the way “experts” analyzed the sport, and Eric Walker, who was one of the earliest to figure out exactly what was amiss. But I’ve never mentioned Mike Gimbel, a numbers-cruncher who was mocked from the game before Moneyball took hold, in a time when advanced analytics, much like taking a walk, was still viewed in the mainstream as a form of weakness. Grantland’s Hua Hsu sought out Gimbel at the recent Left Forum. The opening of his resultant article:

“There are a lot of useful ideas about justice and democracy exchanged across the hundreds of panel discussions that constitute the Left Forum, a three-day meeting of scholars, activists, and concerned citizens that takes place every year in Manhattan. My main interest was baseball. Another was crocodiles.

I had come to listen to a paper being presented by Mike Gimbel. In the 1990s, Gimbel put together a nice side career advising major league teams on player transactions. He had a day job working for the New York City water department, and in his free time he sat in front of his computer, inputted stats, and came up with what he believed was a unified theory of player value. He talked his way into a part-time gig evaluating talent for Dan Duquette, soon to become the general manager of the Montreal Expos. When Duquette moved to the Red Sox, Gimbel was the only Expos staffer he was allowed to take with him — he was a secret weapon of sorts. But during spring training in 1997, Gimbel sat for an interview with the Boston Globe‘s Gordon Edes. Once word spread of Boston’s ‘stat man’ — itself an epithet back in the pre-Moneyball days — the Sox front office immediately distanced itself from him. Local papers described him as crazy, arrogant, a ‘homeless computer geek,’ an eccentric stats hobbyist. He was ridiculed for his unkempt beard, his yellow teeth, and the heavy coat he wore despite the Florida heat. ‘I guess Duquette calls him like he would call the Psychic Network,’ Jose Canseco joked to the local beat writers. Gimbel’s contract expired at the end of the 1997 season. It was his last formal contact with a major league team.”