A Goodbye to The Answer Man

To readers of The Sporting News, he was known as “The Answer Man”, but to me he was simply Uncle John. He passed away earlier this week.

Growing up, my great uncle helped further my love of sports, especially when it came to the underlying stats every sport has in plenty. He sent my dad and I the Baseball Register (which he was long instrumental in putting together as an editor), an annual ode to the mountain of statistics any baseball fan could follow down the rabbit hole. He sent me a plethora of team media packages, and even let my dad and I help him with his Hall of Fame ballot in later years. When my father was younger, Uncle John had introduced him to APBA baseball, a strategy game based on every player’s statistics and the roll of the die. In fact, it was playing APBA that my father credits to him eventually becoming an accountant.

An assistant sports editor in the St. Louis Post Dispatch’s article on my great uncle called him “the Internet before the Internet” for his ability to either know the answer for a seemingly far out stat or be able to find it within his voluminous library of sports books and files within a day. This is especially interesting in the current sports environment, where analytics (which rely on vast quantities of advanced statistical metrics) seem to be the difference between success and failure on the field or court.

I had not ever taken the time to think of how large of an impact my great uncle had on me until he was gone. But now, the impression he left on me seems to be quite large.

I’m currently in accounting, and in doing audits of various companies I’m constantly performing data analytics. I’m moving more toward a data-science and machine learning-based career path. In fact, one of the earliest things I can remember doing with my love of data was trying to make my own personal NFL rankings using a multitude of team statistics. It seems pretty clear to me who was responsible for this love of data and stats came from — and anyone who follows me on Twitter or knows me in person can vouch for my love of sports too.

Goodbye, Uncle John, and thank you.