Keith Law

Keith Law

• School Harvard University, Carnegie Mellon University

• Born June 1, 1973 in Smithtown, NY USA

Biographical Information

Keith Law is a sportswriter best known for popularizing the use of sabermetrics in mainstream baseball reporting.

He was not destined to be a sportswriter as he studied sociology and economics at Harvard University, before obtaining an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University. He began writing material for Baseball Prospectus in 1997 and in 2002 was hired by the Toronto Blue Jays as one of the first representatives of the sabermetric community to work for a major league team, at a time when teams were barely starting to look at analytics as a potential area of interest. His position was "special assistant to the General Manager", in this case J.P. Ricciardi.

He resigned in 2006 to work for ESPN, writing articles on scouting and prospects. Her also maintained a blog, hosted a podcast, and did various other gigs typical of a baseball writer not affiliated with a newspaper in the early 21st century. A number of other teams were apparently interested in hiring him, but he turned them down as he did not want to give the time commitment required of a front office job at a time when he was raising a young family. In 2008, he was admitted to the Baseball Writers Association of America as part of the first group of members who had come up through the internet sabermetric community; others included Rob Neyer, Will Carroll and Christina Kahrl.

In 2020, he joined the staff of The Athletic as a senior baseball writer, alongside Ken Rosenthal. He has published a couple of books on statistics and strategy.

Further Reading

• Keith Law: Smart Baseball: The Story Behind the Old Stats That Are Ruining the Game, the New Ones That Are Running It, and the Right Way to Think About Baseball, HarperCollins, New York, NY, 2017. ISBN 978-0062490223
• Keith Law: The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, William Morrow, New York, NY, 2020. ISBN 978-0062942722