Sy Berger died today (Sunday). I had never heard of him before I heard about his death. According to the headlines on the internet, he’s the man who designed the modern Topps baseball card in 1952.
The headlines undersell him. Vastly.
The Topps baseball card created a baby boom full of kids who learned to love reading stats, and comparing, ranking, and trading players. Those kids arrived just in time for APBA (invented in 1951) and Strat-o-matic (invented in 1961), which were essentially vehicles for putting baseball card collections into competition with each other.
Without baseball cards, and the stat-hyped segment of baby-boom baseball fans they created, Dan Okrent would have just eaten lunch at his desk that day in 1979, instead of hosting his friends at the Rotisserie. Instead of inventing fantasy baseball, he’d just be an obscure former New York Times public editor. (That is, obscure outside of New York, so it’s entirely possible news of his obscurity would never have reached Okrent, or the Times.)
Without baseball cards Bill James (born 1949) would not have discovered baseball stats and would have had to become a police detective. Sabermetrics would be unknown, the A’s would be a forlorn franchise, probably long ago removed to someplace like Oklahoma City. Billy Beane would be a forgotten has-beene, and the Red Sox would still be waiting for a World Series trophy.
Without APBA Don Powers would never have founded the first baseball fantasy league at GFU. And then there’d never have been an EFL.
But these are just the obvious implications, the straight-line chains of causation leading to unsurprising conclusions, that stem from Sy Berger’s greatest achievement. The ripples extend much, much further. Take the LACI class at GFU, for example.
Without Bill James there’d have been no Baseball Abstracts, and thus no rock-solid foundation on which I could stand, firm in my belief that an advanced interdisciplinary general education course was possible. When the GEED Senior Capstone course (now called LACI) looked like it was going nowhere, sent back to a discouraged capstone subcommittee for one last try, I would not have had the inspiration for the prototype syllabus I drafted for that meeting. No LACI class. No Christian Foundations. No LIBA.
Here’s another one of Sy Berger’s accomplishments: without the EFL I’d have more of my grading done by now.
Those are just two of the crazy consequences in my life of Sy Berger’s masterpiece. You probably have more such stories. If you feel like sharing them, they would be a fitting tribute to a man whose greatness likely will never be widely recognized.