Kill-A-Brew Baseball Scoring

     Hi, I’m Michael Lallas, a lifelong stats geek.   

When ranking MLB players with friends, many use a player’s WAR number. My Value for position players is 100% offense and nothing to do with defense.  Kill-A-Brew Fantasy Baseball Scoring is the basis of this book.  It is simple calculations that measure actual productivity of players and managers, and you can calculate a player’s KAB points quickly and easily.  Scoring for KAB Batting is 1 point each for R, H, TB, RBI SB BB, HBP, SH, SF.  KAB pitching is the bare essential categories that matter --- Innings Pitched, Strikeouts, and Earned Runs.  I don’t care if a pitcher issues a walk or allows a hit if that batter doesn’t score. If that batter scores then it will cost the pitcher an earned run (-3).  I give pitchers a bonus, 10 points, for a win. 

     Some people think WAR is the best measure of a player’s all-around value, but the calculations are very complicated and not available to us.  There seems to be some agreement when comparing a player’s KAB points and their WAR but sometimes a player’s productivity (KAB) and WAR are ranked different and sometimes very different.

     In 1986 I played fantasy football for the first time.  I thought it was great because it allowed me to see my friends face to face at the draft and it made watching the NFL a lot more enjoyable.  As the commissioner I did all the scoring with a pen and paper until 1990 when I bought my first state-of-the-art computer.  It had a 286 Processor, 5 ¼” Floppy Disc Drive, Windows 3, and a monochrome screen.  The salesman asked if I wanted the 20 MB or 40 MB hard drive and added “you’ll probably never use 40 MB.”  I added Lotus 1-2-3 and my job as commissioner became much better as I also bought a 9-pin dot matrix printer.  Ten computers later I am still the commissioner of that league and many of those same owners of 40 seasons ago are still in the league.

     Fantasy football was such a hit that I wanted to duplicate it with fantasy baseball but quickly found it too time consuming.  But in 1993 I started the Kill-A-Brew fantasy baseball league.  My solution was for team owners to pick a roster using a value cap for both the American League and National League before the season started.  I assigned a value to every player based on his performance from the year before along with tweaks for players that were injured the previous year.  The winner was the owner with the most fantasy points at the end of the year.  We had no transactions so if your player was injured, he produced no points for you.  Durability was very important back in the salary cap days.

     About this time, I checked out Total Baseball III from the library to plug-in numbers of all-time greats using my Kill-A-Brew fantasy baseball scoring.  I entered some players statistics but soon I was back to college full-time and worked full-time so fantasy baseball history had to wait.  In the spring of 1998, I graduated from the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities and a funny thing happened, I developed insomnia type behavior.  I was fully charged with 4 hours of sleep so that left me with a lot of time every day to kill as I do not watch much tv.  There is not a lot happening between 3 and 7 am so I purchased Total Baseball IV and entered a lot of statistics into Lotus 1-2-3 for hours every day in the wee hours of the morning. 

     My fascination with stats started when I was eleven years old in the summer of 1975. I would read the box scores for baseball or football just about every day.  I would write down the stats leaders every so often in my notebook and would work on simple formulas to grade players.  I was thrilled when I first read slugging percentage stats.  It didn’t seem fair to rank players by batting average because we all know a double is better than a single, a triple is better than a double and a home run is best of all.  In batting average, they all count the same so slugging to me seemed a better calculation.  But slugging by itself was over weighted when compared to batting average, so I added (BA + SLG)/2 = Combined Average.  I later added OBP and divided it by 3 and as a preteen I had my own version of OPS nine years before John Thorn introduced it to the world in 1984.  To this day total bases is my favorite baseball statistic. 

     My family moved from Falcon Heights to Shoreview when I was 15 years old and that notebook and a lot of other memories never made it to our new home --- it would be fun to see that old notebook again.

     I started a one-man speech recognition business in 1999 as a premier partner with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.  My job was to sell, train and program the software.  I worked from home so with no long commute or wasted time in a busy office I once again had guilt free time between 3 and 7 am to enter stats.  I made my first ever purchase on Amazon April 3, 2001, and it was Total Baseball VII.  There were updated stats to 19th century players in volume VII, so I started over with data input going in alphabetical order.  There was no reason I did all this work except that I wanted to find out how players ranked over the decades and discover new ones.  I also wrote a “did you know” paragraph when reporting our weekly fantasy baseball results.  Cap Anson was the first really big surprise.  He was not known by me or any of my friends, but he had an incredible career.  I thought how could such an amazing player become so unknown.  This led me to cherry pick the best players and it became addictive to discover all these players I’ve never heard of before.

     In 2003 Microsoft Windows XP operating system had speech recognition included for free.  Even though the software did not perform well it seemed that it was just a matter of time before they would dominate speech recognition.  Microsoft contacted me in the summer of 2003 to partner with me, but it seemed they were only interested in my client list.  So, I posted my resume on Monster.com and to my surprise I was contacted by several financial companies.  I knew nothing about finances, but I was assured I had the aptitude to become a Financial Advisor.  I started my new career in November of 2003 and retired October 22, 2025.

     Training, obtaining all the required licenses to become a Financial Advisor and later a Registered Investment Advisor as well as building my business requ

ired all my attention.  Life became a little more chaotic with the birth of my twins Dylan and Lola in March 2004.  The next four years were a blur, and I entered no baseball stats. 

     In 2008 my twins turned 4 years old, and I started pitching batting practice to them with tennis balls at the park.  My son would swing with all his might on every pitch, and my daughter had a controlled power swing that reminded me of Harmon Killebrew.  We went to the park several times a week, me pitching, the kids swing hard, and my black lab Payton was a great fielder.  He would retrieve the batted balls and bring them to me.  Those were some of my favorite days.  While pitching batting practice one day I was thinking about how much fun it was to watch my kids develop their baseball skills and imagine what it was like for my baseball heroes when they were kids playing baseball with their dad.  It didn’t occur to me until 2011 to wonder how long dads have been teaching their kids baseball as my dad did not teach me.  The next thought was where did baseball come from?  I remembered something about Abner Doubleday inventing baseball, so I went in search of the beginnings of baseball. 

     This is when I learned about the Mills commission of 1905.  The commission was sparked by Henry Chadwick who published in 1903 that baseball evolved from rounders, a game played in England.   The Baseball powers wanted to report that baseball was entirely an American invention to contradict Chadwick.  Baseball released their findings on December 30, 1907, and reported that Civil War hero Abner Doubleday instantaneously and single handedly invented baseball in 1839 while in a cow pasture in Cooperstown, NY.  Without going into depth Doubleday did not invent baseball.

     I discovered several articles online written by John Thorn.  Four Fathers of Baseball (2005) was life altering for me and I proceeded to read everything I could find written by Thorn and other baseball historians.  Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game was my first John Thorn book, besides Total Baseball, and it intrigued me more than ever to discover early baseball.  I dropped the endless data entering and focused on the origins of baseball.  I found informative articles by Randall Brown, Monica Nucciarone, and others. Besides Baseball In The Garden, some other of my favorite books on early baseball include The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It (Lawrence S. Ritter), Gentlemen at the Bat: A Fictional Oral History of the New York Knickerbockers and the Early Days of Base Ball (Howard Burman), When Johnny Came Sliding Home – The Post-Civil War Baseball Boom, 1965-1870 (William J. Ryczek), among others.  After exhaustive study, it is my opinion that boys and girls have been playing ball and stick games since we were neanderthals and it has evolved into modern baseball.

     In 2012 the stats geek in me was thrilled when I purchased The National Association of Base Ball Players, 1857-1870 Paperback – April 15, 2000, by Marshall D. Wright.  The National Association of Base Ball Players was the governing body of baseball for 14 years until the first all professional league, and the birth of Major League Baseball, the National Association in 1871.  This book includes all the teams that formed the National Association of Base Ball Players in1857 including game scores and individual’s batting stats.  The individual yearly stats include Position, Games Played, Hands Lost (HL), Average (A), Over (O), Runs, Average (A), Over (O).  Average and Over stats were borrowed from cricket.  Average and over (runs) was the average number of runs a player scored per game, expressed as a whole number and a remainder. If a player scored 31 runs in nine games, his average runs per game would be three, with four left over and would be written as 3,4.  Hands Lost was the term used as outs.  If a player had 21 Hands Lost (outs) in 9 games his A&O would be written 2,3. 

     According to Wright’s book (p.8) in 1857 a Mr. Gelston, starting catcher for the Eagle club, scored the most runs (33), played 9 games and his AO was 3,6.  While L M. Bergen, the catcher for the Atlantics of Brooklyn, NY, had one of the lowest Hands Lost AO as he made 12 outs in 5 games for a 2,2.  In 1868 teams started reporting a player’s Hits and Total Bases and both were written as AO.  In 1870 they started using decimals as we use them today.

     It was fun to see players from the National Association in Wright’s book.  In 1858 Harry Wright was a pitcher and catcher for the New York Knickerbockers to start his playing career and on his way to becoming a father of baseball.  Eighteen-year-old Charlie Smith played his first of thirteen seasons for the Brooklyn Atlantics in 1858 before joining the Mutuals of New York in 1871 as a third baseman.  The Chicago Cubs (White Stocking in 1871) first shortstop was 27-year-old Ed Duffy who started his career as a 16-year-old second baseman for the Eagle of New York in 1860. 

     Nate Berkenstock is probably the first person born to play Major League Baseball.  Born September 17, 1832, in Philadelphia, Berkenstock was the cofounder of the Philadelphia Athletics on April 7, 1860, and was a power hitting first baseman for years before playing one game as the right fielder for the Athletics in 1871.  What happened the year Berkenstock was born?   Andrew Jackson was the president of the United States.  Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the last surviving signatory of the Declaration of Independence dies at his home in Maryland at age 95.  The Ordinance of Nullification is passed which set the stage for conflict during the antebellum era, eventually leading to the American Civil War.

     When perfecting the calculations for players to get into the Kill-A-Brew Hall of Fame, I discovered some players enshrined at Cooperstown had KAB scores that were nowhere near good enough to make it into the KAB HOF.  How could this be?  I read about Frankie Frisch and how his buddies were elected to the HOF when he was the chairman of the committee on Baseball Veterans.  I picked up the book Whatever Happened To The Hall Of Fame? (Bill James) and I agree with him that several inducted players have no business being in the Hall of Fame.

     Calculating KAB points for Managers is simple: 2 pts per Game + 2 pts per Win + 50 pts per Pennant + 50 pts per World Series win.  Most managers in the KAB HOF are in or will be in the MLB HOF except for a few that never won a World Series regardless of their high numbers of wins.  There are others that won a World Series or two and have a lot of career wins, but the baseball powers decide to exclude some deserving managers.  A great book in my collection is all about managers --- The Bill James Guide To Baseball Managers.  This book was written in 1997, and it covers managers from the 1870s -1990s.

     I don’t recall when I discovered BaseballReference.com but I used Baseball Reference to double check every stat of every player, and it took me many years to complete.  All these years later and with my retirement I decided to offer the results and rankings of all MLB players using my Kill-A-Brew Baseball Scoring system in book form so that stats geeks like me can discover a new, and I believe, better way of ranking players. 

     As a baseball fan I hope you find this book informative and a great reference source on the history of the great game of baseball and all its teams, players, and managers.

     If you have any comments or suggestions please feel free to send me an email.

Thank you for your support,

Michael