Allan Roth

Allan Roth (born Abraham Roth; May 17, 1917 – March 3, 1992) was a Canadian baseball and hockey statistician and an early proponent of sabermetrics in baseball. During his career, Roth worked for the Brooklyn/Los Angeles Dodgers as their official statistician from 1947 to 1964.

Roth is considered by many to be the father of modern sabermetrics. He was the first full-time statistician ever employed by a Major League Baseball team, creating a number of new baseball statistics over the course of his work.

Early life Roth was born in Montreal, Quebec to Jewish immigrants Rose (née Silverheart) and Nathan Roth. He was second of three children, born after his older brother Max and his younger sister Sylvia.

Roth attended Strathcona Academy and, in his free time, compiled statistics for his hometown Montreal Royals of the International League. Additionally, he also compiled hockey statistics. He attended and graduated from McGill University. He would legally change his name from "Abraham" to "Allan" in 1941. At the end of each season, he would compile the numbers on each player, including his newer, advanced stats. He also spent the next eighteen seasons recording every pitch thrown in a Dodgers game as well as their outcome.

After Rickey departed from the Dodgers, new owner Walter O'Malley moved Roth to the press and public relations operation. As a result, his analyses and statistics began to appear regularly in the newspaper columns. Roth ran a publication called Press Box Pickups, which contained his work as well as promotional material and was distributed in the press box during gamedays. He was also put in charge of providing statistics for the team's yearbooks and media guides.

After the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, Roth began to attend spring training in Vero Beach, Florida. He began to meet up with each player and would evaluate their performance from the previous year, emphasizing their strengths and weaknesses and suggesting changes to help the player improve their performance. Future Hall of Fame pitcher Sandy Koufax credited Roth with helping him turn around his career through these sessions. Statistician Bill James wrote that Roth "was decades ahead of his time" and was the person who "started it all" when it came to baseball statistical analysis.

The Society of American Baseball Research (SABR) named their Los Angeles chapter, where he was often attended meetings and showed his new workings during the offseasons, in his honor. In 2019, they posthumously awarded him the Henry Chadwick Award for his contributions to baseball research.

Personal life Roth married Esther Machlovitch in 1940. The couple had two children: a son named Michael, and a daughter named Andrea. They divorced in 1965, one year after his affair was discovered and he was fired by the Dodgers.