Keith Woolner, the Indians’ Manager of Baseball Analysis and Research, was kind enough to spend an hour talking with me about any number of things recently — from his role in the organization, to thoughts on advanced metrics and the media, to a ton of other stuff. Here’s the first 30 minutes or so (coming in at a incredibly reasonable 3220 words) of our talk. Part II coming tomorrow, or whenever I finish transcribing it.
VG: First, where did you grow up?
KW: I was born in New Hampshire. And I lived there until I was about ten years old, then we moved to Orlando, Florida, and I graduated high school there, so I lived the rest of my youth in the Orlando area.
VG: Who was your team?
KW: The Boston Red Sox. Until I got the job here I was a lifelong Red Sox fan. But, your loyalties shift remarkably quick.
VG: Yeah, I read in the BP chat that it came really soon.
KW: I started with the Indians in 2007 and a few months later we’re in the playoffs against the Red Sox. There was no sort of divided loyalties or anything. It was clear which side I wanted.
VG: Ok, so when did you first start getting into the advanced statistics?
KW: I was a fan from a pretty young age, but when we moved to Florida I got away from it for awhile. I started getting back into it in college when I went to MIT. I could see the lights from Fenway shining in my windows at night, and just having that sort of access rekindled a passion for baseball. And right about that time there was an emerging online community that was talking about baseball and some weird guy named Bill James who I never heard of. So I started following those discussions as a reader and got interested and said , Hey, I wonder if I could come up with some of my own stuff, and I published that stuff on my own web page.
Eventually it got the attention of the guys who had recently started Prospectus so they invited me to come on as a writer. So I ended up working with them as a hobby or second job for about ten years. Ended up co-authoring a bunch of books, built up a lot of the statistics portion of the web site, that led to when I had a chance to look around for my next career, I thought well, let me talk to some teams and see if there’s any interest in a guy like me, and the Indians responded and here I am.
This article appears in May 6-12, 2009.
