Dick Cramer (author)

Dick Cramer, not to be confused with the former ballplayer Dick Cramer, was a founder of STATS, Inc., the baseball statistics and information company. He has also been active on Retrosheet with David W. Smith.

Born in 1942, he grew up in Wilmington, DE where his father was a chemist for the DuPont Corporation. Cramer holds a bachelor degree from Harvard University and a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Although a long-time sabermetrician, he worked for Polaroid from 1967-1971, SmithKline from 1971-1983, and since 1983 has worked for Tripos as a chemist and executive.

Cramer's 1977 article in the Baseball Research Journal about clutch hitting is often cited as quite influential. He is also the person who re-discovered OPS and made it a popular statistic.

He was named a recipient of the Henry Chadwick Award in 2015.

Further Reading

• Richard D. Cramer: When Big Data Was Small: My Life in Baseball Analytics and Drug Design, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE, 2019. ISBN 978-1-4962-1205-4
• Rob Neyer: "Dick Cramer", The Baseball Research Journal, SABR, Vol. 44, Number 1 (Spring 2015), p. 119.

Related Sites

• SABR Tribute page