Charles "Chuck" Waseleski (November 30, 1954 – April 7, 2016) was an American pioneering

sabermetrician Sabermetrics, or originally SABRmetrics, is the empirical analysis of baseball, especially baseball statistics that measure in-game activity. Sabermetricians collect and summarize the relevant data from this in-game activity to answer specific ques ...

from Massachusetts. Waseleski was called "the czar of hardball software" by ''

Boston Globe ''The Boston Globe'' is an American daily newspaper founded and based in Boston, Massachusetts. The newspaper has won a total of 27 Pulitzer Prizes, and has a total circulation of close to 300,000 print and digital subscribers. ''The Boston Glob ...

'' sportswriter

Dan Shaughnessy Dan Shaughnessy (born July 20, 1953) is an American sports writer. He has covered the Boston Red Sox for ''The Boston Globe'' since 1981. In 2016, he was given the J. G. Taylor Spink Award by the Baseball Hall of Fame. Shaughnessy is often refe ...

, but was most famously known in Boston as "The Maniacal One", a sobriquet often seen on the sports pages of the ''Globe''. The nickname, coined by

Steve Fainaru Steve Fainaru ( ro, Făinaru; born 1962) is an American investigative journalist and senior writer for ESPN.com and ''ESPN The Magazine''. He was previously a correspondent for the ''Washington Post'', where his coverage of the Iraq War earned him ...

and continued in use by

Gordon Edes Gordon Edes (born Sept. 24, 1954) is an American sportswriter who as a beat reporter covered all four major professional U.S. leagues (MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL) in the course of a nearly 40-year career that began in 1976 with the ''Chicago Tribune''. ...

, Peter Gammons, and Nick Cafardo, honored Waseleski's extreme attention to detail. Waseleski, more a statistics compiler than an analyst, kept track for many years of every pitch and every ball in play of every

Boston Red Sox The Boston Red Sox are an American professional baseball team based in Boston. The Red Sox compete in Major League Baseball (MLB) as a member club of the American League (AL) East division. Founded in as one of the American League's eight ...

game, during the early days of sabermetrics when this data was not routinely compiled. Waseleski did not practice sabermetrics as a full-time profession (he worked for an engineering consulting firm), although he did publish monthly and seasonal reports for a while and was employed by sports agents, and excerpts of his work appeared in works by

Bill James George William James (born October 5, 1949) is an American baseball writer, historian, and statistician whose work has been widely influential. Since 1977, James has written more than two dozen books devoted to baseball history and statistics. ...

and in ''Globe''

newspaper column A column is a recurring piece or article in a newspaper, magazine or other publication, where a writer expresses their own opinion in few columns allotted to them by the newspaper organisation. Columns are written by columnists. What different ...

s beginning in the 1980s.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Waseleski, Chuck 1954 births 2016 deaths People from Montague, Massachusetts American statisticians Baseball statisticians