F.C. Lane
From BR Bullpen
Ferdinand Cole Lane
- Born October 25, 1885 near Moorhead, MN USA
- Died April 20, 1984 in Hyannis, MA USA
[edit] Biographical Information
F.C. Lane was born October 25, 1885 near Moorhead, MN. A Sabermetrician long before there ever was such a thing, Lane was Editor-in-Chief of Baseball Magazine, published in Boston, MA from 1910 to 1912 and then in New York City from 1912 to 1938. He wrote probably close to a thousand detailed articles on baseball's technical side as well as interviews with stars at home in winter. Among his sabermetric insights, he was the first to devise a basic "run expectancy model", i.e. a table predicting how many runs would on average be scored from a given situation of outs and men on base. This was only rediscovered by researchers decades later after falling into oblivion, but his figures turned out to be extremely close to those devised by later researchers using computers and thousands of games worth of data. In tribute, SABR republished his book Batting in 2001.
After retiring in 1937 from the editor's chair, he returned to Cape Cod for the remainder of his long life. He headed Piedmont College's History Department at Demorest, GA from 1941 to 1943 and established a journalism program there. He traveled extensively with his wife Emma, whom he married in June, 1914.
Together they made many overseas voyages, circling the globe six times. They wrote several books on geography and nature for adults and youths in the 1940s and 1950s. He published his poems in 1958 (On Old Cape Cod). They lived their final years in a Cape Cod nursing home; she dying 10 months after him. He died at age 98 on April 20, 1984 in Hyannis, MA.
In 2012, he was named a posthumous recipient of the Chadwick Award.
[edit] Writing Samples
[edit] Related Sites
- SABR tribute page
- For a blog discussion of Lane, see Dan Agonistes Blog
- For a full Bibliography of 389 articles from SABR's The Baseball Index (TBI)
