The Man Who Wrote The Fielding Bible
As children, some people dream of playing professional baseball. Others dream of leveraging actuarial skills to conduct fielding analyses. Well, maybe that wasn't his childhood dream, but as an adult, that's exactly what actuary John Dewan, FSA does.
“I work as an actuary, and I do actuarial work a little different than my actuarial buddies. I work in sports statistics," explained Dewan during a recent CBS interview. Over the past 25 years, Dewan has a name for himself for systematically analyzing baseball games, one aspect of which is determining the probability of fielding a ball based on the distance, direction and velocity the ball travels.
Dewan has shared his system with the public through his book, The Fielding Bible. Dewan does not enjoy writing for fun, but acknowledges it's important to be able to communicate thoughts coherently, "I've always hated writing, but in order to communicate your ideas you need to be able to write and be able to explain your ideas in a way that people find enjoyable." And Dewan has done just that. The Fielding Bible is credited with bringing cutting-edge fielding analysis to the mainstream. A credit to the book's success, Dewan is currently working on The Fielding Bible II. One of the things that sets Dewan's books apart from most other sports statistics publications is that while most other books discuss batting and pitching, Dewan’s analyzes fielding, an analysis based in actuarial skills.
The key to Dewan's book was taking the complex calculations and finding a way to share them in a less complicated way. He did this through a system he calls the Plus/Minus System. With this system he is able to communicate complex actuarial calculations to the mainstream public in a way that is more easily understood. For example, a shortstop with a positive rating is doing well, a zero rating is neutral and a negative rating means they could use some work.
Baseball Info Solutions, Dewan's company, is highly successful with over a dozen major league teams as clients using products like The Fielding Bible as a tool to develop defensive and other game strategies. Beyond that, Dewan's book is currently part of a statistics curriculum at Tufts University, helping students to learn about interesting analytical approaches in the game of baseball. Dewan doesn't stop there. He has also taken his skills out of print and applied them to the radio waves with his weekly segment called "Stat of the Week" on 670 The Score, a sports radio station in Chicago. This show has earned Dewan recognition by numerous sportscasters who look to his stats to spice up their broadcasts. As if this was not enough, Dewan also applies his skills to the Olympics, football and other professional sports as well.
Dewan's successful application of actuarial skills in sports analysis, and the way in which he communicates these complicated sports statistics to the public, is helping create a more dynamic image of the actuarial profession in the public eye. It’s a home run for both Dewan and the profession!