Sherri Nichols facts for kids

Sherri Nichols is an American software engineer, data scientist, and baseball statistician. She is best known for her important work in the Sabermetrics movement in baseball. Sabermetrics uses math and statistics to analyze baseball in new ways. Sherri loved both baseball and math as she grew up. She combined these two interests to start looking at baseball with a focus on numbers.

Her work in the 1980s and 1990s greatly influenced the early days of Sabermetrics. Some of her key contributions include Nichols' Law of Catcher Defense, collecting detailed game data, and helping create "Defensive Average." Sherri Nichols' knowledge and strong ideas have inspired many other famous baseball statisticians. She also helped open doors for other women in an industry mostly dominated by men.

Sherri Nichols' Early Life

Sherri Nichols grew up in Clarksville, Tennessee. She was a big fan of the Cincinnati Reds baseball team. Baseball helped her connect with her father and brother. Besides baseball, she also loved math and science.

Nichols went to Tennessee Tech University for her first degree in physics. Later, she studied computer science as a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University.

Nichols' Career in Baseball Analytics

How Sherri Nichols Started in Baseball Stats

While studying computer science at Carnegie Mellon, Nichols found Usenet. This was like an early version of the internet in the 1980s. On Usenet, she started writing for "rec.sport.baseball." This was a page where baseball analysts from the 1970s and 80s talked about new ways to understand the game.

Many people who wrote for "rec.sport.baseball" later became important in sports analytics. Some even helped create the first editions of Baseball Prospectus. This is an organization that still shares baseball analysis today.

It was on "rec.sport.baseball" that Nichols first understood how important overlooked statistics were. For example, she saw how on-base percentage affected how well a team played. During this time, she also created Nichols' Law of Catcher Defense. This was one of her first big contributions to Sabermetrics.

Nichols' Law of Catcher Defense Explained

Nichols' Law of Catcher Defense says: "A catcher's defensive reputation is inversely proportional to their offensive abilities." This means that if a catcher starts hitting better, people might unfairly think they are worse at defense, even if their defense hasn't changed.

Project Scoresheet and Defensive Average

In October 1983, a famous baseball statistician named Bill James started Project Scoresheet. This project asked people across the country to help collect detailed baseball data that had never been recorded before. Sherri and her husband, David Nichols, volunteered for the Pittsburgh team to track game data.

Working on Project Scoresheet led Sherri and David to attend yearly meetings held by the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR). SABR is a leading baseball analytics group, and the word "sabermetrics" comes from its name. At these meetings, Sherri met Pete DeCoursey, who also worked on Project Scoresheet in a different area.

Creating Defensive Average

Using the data collected through Project Scoresheet, Sherri and Pete worked together to create a new baseball measurement called "Defensive Average." Nichols used her computer science skills to develop the software for this statistic.

Defensive Average is explained as: "the number of balls fielded by a player at a position divided by the number of balls hit to that fielder's zone of responsibility while he's playing that position." This new measurement offered a much better way to measure a player's defensive skills than older methods. Many baseball analysts realized that previous ways of analyzing defense were not very accurate.

Around the same time, from 1990 to 1995, Nichols also worked in Silicon Valley. She was a software engineer for Adobe. In 1995, after her daughter Susan was born, Nichols slowly stepped back from working on Defensive Average and other baseball analytics. She passed her work on to new people.

Retrosheet: Making Data Free

Project Scoresheet ended in 1989. But a former Project Scoresheet volunteer and baseball analyst, David Smith, started Retrosheet. Like Project Scoresheet, Retrosheet is a non-profit group. It collects game summaries and detailed play-by-play statistics from all of baseball's history.

Nichols was chosen to be the vice president and treasurer of Retrosheet. This was because of her positive work in Project Scoresheet and at the SABR meetings. She held this position at Retrosheet until 2003.

In the very first board meeting, Nichols changed how data scientists collected information. She made all of Retrosheet's data available for free and open to everyone. She believed that money problems had caused Project Scoresheet to fail. Nichols thought that sports teams and organizations would work more with Retrosheet if they didn't have to pay for the data.

As she expected, Retrosheet became very successful. Retrosheet has collected data for 182,911 out of 194,908 MLB games played between 1901 and 2018. Nichols' work at Retrosheet has directly provided data to well-known baseball databases and analytics groups. These include Baseball-Reference, FanGraphs, and Baseball Prospectus.

Nichols' Influence on Analytics

During her time working in baseball analytics, Nichols only received one job offer from a professional baseball team. It was an unpaid job for the Pittsburgh Pirates to collect and analyze data for a short time. She turned down the offer, and no other teams contacted her again.

Even though she never worked for a baseball team's front office, she greatly influenced many baseball data scientists in the 1980s and 1990s. Nichols was a woman in a field mostly dominated by men. Yet, her strong ideas and deep knowledge greatly influenced big names in Sabermetrics. These included Bill James, David Smith, and Gary Huckabay. Her contributions have also led to more women working in the sports business field today.

Life After Baseball Analytics

Since leaving the Retrosheet team, Nichols has not worked in sports analytics. She recently said that she never planned to make baseball analytics her career. For her, it was just a hobby.

Today, Nichols is part of a truancy board and a city planning commission in Redmond, Washington. She also works for the American Civil Liberties Union.

Sherri Nichols' Achievements

• Nichols' Law of Catcher Defense: "A catcher's defensive reputation in baseball is inversely proportional to their offensive abilities." Nichols noticed that players like Mickey Tettleton were seen as bad defensive players. This happened even though they were known as excellent defensive catchers before they became better hitters.
• Defensive Average: "The number of balls fielded by a player at a position divided by the number of balls hit to that fielder's zone of responsibility while he's playing that position." Nichols and Pete DeCoursey created this together. Even with some small flaws, Defensive Average was a top way to measure a baseball player's defensive skill. Modern measurements like Total Zone and Ultimate Zone Rating are based on Defensive Average. These are used today to help decide Gold Glove Awards in the MLB.
• Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Award (2016): Nichols won this award for helping create the Andrew File System in the 1980s with her husband, David Nichols. This system was recognized as the "first distributed file system designed for tens of thousands of machines." It is still considered one of the largest systems ever built and has been used by over 100,000 companies worldwide.