The odds were not in his favor. Guy Stevens ’13 didn’t need his double major in math and economics to understand that. His right arm made him a good enough baseball player to pitch for the Pomona-Pitzer Sagehens, but it was not going to get him to the major leagues.

 About 450,000 youngsters play Little League Baseball each year. Some go on to play in high school and almost 32,000 played in college for National Collegiate Athletic Association teams last year. A fraction of those high school and college players are drafted, destined for long bus rides and budget hotels in the minor leagues. They are all fighting for one of 750 jobs in the big leagues. In the history of Pomona College, precisely one player, Harry Kingman, has made it, playing in four games for the New York Yankees in 1914.

Stevens already made it to the majors last summer with the New York Mets and is back again this season with the Kansas City Royals. His bankable talent is with a computer, not his fastball, and he is taking the multiple internship route to try to land a coveted job doing statistical analysis in the front office of a major league team.

“I was really into baseball, but didn’t know it was a feasible career path,” Stevens says. “Now I’m going to see how far I can take this, see if I can do this.”

Stevens, 21, is riding the wave of a sea change in professional baseball in the decade since the publication of the 2003 book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game—later a movie starring Brad Pitt—about the Oakland Athletics’ use of statistical analysis to try to maximize a low payroll. A game traditionally run by executives who were either former professional players or scouts who spent years in the stands with a stopwatch and a radar gun is increasingly dotted with Ivy Leaguers, academics and young people with math or finance backgrounds as the 30 major league teams—some of them billion-dollar businesses—try to mine the avalanche of available data.

“There aren’t many jobs,” says Adam Fisher, a Harvard graduate who is director of baseball operations for the Mets and supervised Stevens last summer after starting his career as an intern himself. “But I think he has the ability. I would bet on him, yeah. “He kind of comes at it with a unique blend of skills and talents, having played college baseball and having a real strong math and stats background. Generally, you see one or the other.”

GREGARIOUS AND HANDSOME despite his wonkish affection for stats, Stevens grew up an Oakland A’s fan in the East Bay town of Lafayette and played baseball at Campolindo High School in Moraga. His father is an investment portfolio manager in San Francisco, and his mother once worked in finance as well.

“I thought I’d do something like that. I knew I was good with numbers,” he says. His early forays into the numbers behind the game started as a teenager.

“I read Moneyball pretty soon after it came out. My freshman year in high school, I started playing fantasy baseball, and I was playing with some of my friends on the baseball team,” says Stevens, noting that those teammates were not quite as numbers-savvy. “So I thought, ‘I’m going to see what I can do to get an edge,’ and I really started looking at his stuff and just got caught up in it.”

Statistics always have been important in baseball, but in recent decades the familiar stats such as batting average, ERA (earned-run average) and RBI (runs batted in) have been supplemented by an alphabet soup of acronyms, all trying to quantify aspects of the game. There’s WHIP (walks and hits per inning pitched) WAR (wins above replacement) BABIP (batting average on balls in play) and FIP (fielding-independent pitching) and those are just some of the more well-known ones.

The challenge is to sift through the gargantuan amount of data and shape it in useful ways—and most important, to try to predict performance and assess the monetary value of a player’s skill. The A’s, for example, concluded a stat such as on-base percentage, which includes walks, might be as important as a traditional stat like batting average in determining a player’s value to a team. The Boston Red Sox used some of the same principles in putting together the teams that won the 2004 and 2007 World Series with a brain trust that was led by Yale graduate Theo Epstein and included advisor Bill James, an influential figure who has written about statistics since the 1970s.

Today, technological advances help fuel the stats craze. Leaning over his MacBook Pro in an empty office in Millikan Laboratory, the 6-foot-2 Stevens stares at a screen full of columns of stats and mostly indecipherable abbreviations. To his trained eye, flesh-and-blood players and games that were played seasons ago appear.

Since 2006, Major League Baseball has used a system that positions cameras to track the speed and movement of every pitch thrown in a game, giving statisticians a deep resource of information. So does a site called Retrosheet.org, which has digitally recorded the play-by-play accounts of most major league games since 1956.

To illustrate, Stevens called up a 1997 game between the Angels and Boston Red Sox in Anaheim and showed that a first-inning pitch against a right-handed batter was fouled back. That sort of detailed information can be used to identify tendencies of certain batters and pitchers that, when put together, can give clues to a player’s value to a particular team. “Sites like this make it possible for people outside front offices to do analytics,” Stevens says.

Stevens did just that at Pomona, where his time on the field was limited by injuries until the 2012 season when he emerged as the team’s closer. (He also played a stint on the national team of Israel, where his mother grew up. See story on page 28.) So Stevens huddled in his room in Lawry Court and dug deeper into the world of stats. Eventually, he created a blog, DormRoomGM.com that impressed major league executives.

“I’d do a lot of hypothetical, ‘Could Team X improve their roster by trading Player A for Player B?’” Stevens recalls. “That was mostly for fun because those trades are so unlikely to happen.”

IT WAS DURING THE SUMMER before his junior year that Stevens became focused on his track toward more sophisticated work in baseball analytics —also sometimes called sabermetrics, taking the name from the Society for American Baseball Research. In Claremont for the summer to work on an ill-defined academic project involving minor league baseball stats, he kept running into Gabe Chandler, a Pomona associate professor of statistics who also helps coach the baseball team.

Chandler helped Stevens focus the project, and the two used a statistical method called random forests to try to determine which qualities in minor league players predict they will progress to the majors. The work grew into a scholarly article published in the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports that the pair coauthored. The study got the attention of Wired, which ran a story on its website.

“He had collected some interesting data, data nobody really had,” Chandler says. “Everybody and their sister has analyzed major league data, so that’s not a new problem. But for whatever reason, nobody had really looked at the minor leagues. … But he probably knew that, because he thinks about this so much.”

Among their conclusions: Strikeouts in rookie ball, the lowest level of professional baseball, bode poorly for success. That might seem obvious, but the same didn’t hold true at higher levels of the minor leagues.

“It really only shows up in rookie ball,” Chandler says. “Because usually the people that get sent to rookie ball are high school players. College players usually start in low-A ball. You see a high school kid and they’re not facing quality pitching, so somehow you’re drafting these kids based off of, I don’t know what—athleticism or ‘tools.’ But you’ve never seen these kids try to hit a 95-mile-an-hour fastball. So you draft them and give them a lot of money and then send them to rookie ball, where they’re facing the few high school pitchers that can throw 95. And if they can still put the bat on the ball, then that’s a good sign. And if they can’t.…”

That’s the sort of insight teams that hire statisticians are looking for—anything that can give them an edge in evaluating talent to predict performance and the probability of winning on the field.

Chandler made what turned out to be a key connection for Stevens at a conference when he met Ben Baumer, now a visiting assistant math professor at Smith College in Northampton, Mass., but previously the statistical analyst for the Mets for nine seasons. By last summer, Baumer and Stevens were both working for the Mets.

“Very few jobs doing this existed 10 years ago,” says Baumer, who collaborated with noted sports author and economist Andrew Zimbalist to write a book, The Sabermetric Revolution: Assessing the Growth of Analytics in Baseball, to be published in December.

“I got a job with the Mets in 2004 and they had never had someone doing that before. Things have changed quite dramatically,” Baumer says. “There are only about five teams that aren’t doing it now, and the Rays (Tampa Bay’s major league team) have about eight people dedicated to this, several of them with master’s degrees, and a programmer.

“Guy did a good job for us,” Baumer says. “It’s hard to speculate, but I think he’s definitely put himself in a good position with a strong quantitative background, playing college baseball and the internships.”

While working for the Mets, Stevens learned more data an programming skills using SQL, or Structured Query Language. His duties were as varied as summarizing the player reports sent in by minor league managers each day, using statistics to analyze how to put together a major league bullpen and, at some games, identifying pitches for the stadium scoreboard display—fastball, changeup, curve, even R. A. Dickey’s knuckleballs. After nervously working his first game charting pitches after being teased that fans would boo if he got one wrong, Stevens walked into an office for his review.

“One of my bosses is sitting there and he’s got a piece of paper in front of him and he was like, ‘Guy, so, you got about 82 percent of the pitches right, which is pretty low.’ And I was, ‘Oh, God,’ and super nervous. But he was just holding a [random] piece of paper. They didn’t keep track.”

The Royals saw Stevens’ experience with the Mets, read his blog and were impressed: After hiring him for a six-month internship starting this summer that he hopes might grow into a regular job, the club asked him to take down his blog, considering it proprietary information. He works for Mike Groopman, the Royals’ director of baseball analytics, a graduate of Columbia University who broke into the game with internships with the Cincinnati Reds and the Mets.

STEVENS’ SAGEHEN PITCHING CAREER ended with a loss in the NCAA Division III regionals a week before his May graduation from Pomona. He pitched a final time, gutting through the pain of an elbow injury that cost him much of his senior season.

He understands that statistics, too, have their limits. For example, analysts have struggled to quantify fielding ability, though new technology is coming. “That’s something I’ll hopefully get to work on in Kansas City,” Stevens says.

Or what about deception, he suggested, such as a pitcher’s ability to hide the ball and disguise a pitch? Or the quality of being a clutch player, or a good teammate whose work ethic sets an example?

“I think the next big edge a team could get would be either if they’re a little bit better at preventing players from being injured, or just knowing who’s an injury risk and either getting rid of them or just not acquiring them in the first place,” Stevens says, knowing that with his history of arm problems, he would be considered such a risk.

Armed with his degree and experience, he will take a swing at the big leagues, understanding how competitive a field it is and knowing there are only 30 of the holy grail of front-office jobs, general manager. If not baseball, Stevens said, maybe he will turn to a career in finance.

“I’d really like to be a GM,” he said. “That’s the dream. I mean, the dream used to be to play, but I’m realistic.”

Striding onto the freshly mowed field at Wig Beach, I began my Sagehen softball senior day with a smile on my face, caught up in the festive mood. Streamers, balloons and banners celebrating the soon-to-be graduates on the team sparkled in the sunlight of a Saturday afternoon. But as I stood, a few hours later, about to step in to face Cal Lutheran’s top pitcher, tears filled my eyes. I wiped my face with the V-neck of my once-crisp, now grass-stained uniform and took a deep breath.

It wasn’t just my final at-bat for the Pomona-Pitzer Sagehens or my final at-bat after four years and 300 at-bats as a collegiate softball player. It was my final at-bat ever in the somewhat obscure world that is fastpitch softball, a realm I had been competing in since the third grade.

Fastpitch softball doesn’t have the name recognition of baseball, basketball or soccer. Yet, 2.4 million people in the U.S. above the age of six, mostly females, play fastpitch, according to a 2012 report from the Sports and Fitness Industry Association. At the college level, that number dwindles to 29,670 women. A select few women’s college fastpitch players go on to play for the U.S. National Team. Others will join the handful of adult fastpitch leagues. But for the vast majority of us, college marks both the pinnacle and the abrupt end of our fastpitch careers. After that, players must learn to accept a recreational form of the sport. As my former teammate Kindra Wilson ’08 puts it: “When you graduate it’s a forced retirement. The only option is slowpitch softball.”

With more than three times as many participants, the slowpitch version of softball far exceeds fastpitch in both numbers and name recognition. It is an all-inclusive game that draws skilled former fastpitch softball and baseball players, recreational players and novices looking for a social activity. Young and old play it at picnics and parks across the country. For former fastpitch athletes, it’s the only way to stay connected to the game, but it’s not our game.

I started playing fastpitch when I was 8. Within four years, I was competing year-round on select teams, traveling around California from my home in Marin County to play four to seven games each weekend. We would play in the early mornings or late at night, in fierce wind or light rain, in 110-degree July heat in Modesto and 40-degree chill at Lake Tahoe. I would return home with bumps and bruises and a coat of dirt covering my face.

On weekdays, I attended practices or met with a private hitting coach who taught me to shorten my swing to get around on a fastball–at the college level, pitchers throw upwards of 65 m.p.h. from only 43 feet away forcing the batter to react more quickly than a Major League Baseball player connecting with a 90 m.p.h. fastball.

For many of us skilled enough to play in college, fastpitch became our identity. We sacrificed parties, hanging out with friends or even taking coveted classes, to be at the field daily until the sun set. We attended 8 a.m. weight training and shared meals and weekends together. We were a family, united by the same goals: to play to our potential and to win and lose as a team. We all loved the rush of competing on the field for each other and our schools. We celebrated our wins, and lingered over losses. Another former teammate of mine, Ali Corley ’11, who still holds the Sagehen career homerun record, sums it up best: “It was such a huge part of my life. It’s hard being very good at something that doesn’t matter when you graduate.”

Back to my own final at bat as a Sagehen, I vividly recall standing in the batter’s box as Cal Lutheran’s pitcher sent the ball rising toward the plate. I swung and heard the loud ping of rubber meeting metal. The yellow ball soared nearly 200 feet toward the left field fence. The outfielder sprinted back, looked up, and, in one fluid motion, extended her glove toward the ball.

Out! Nothing came easy in fastpitch. Only a few months after I graduated from Pomona, I stood on a makeshift softball field in tennis shoes with a group of colleagues at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. As the captain, I brought extra gloves for my new team and assigned positions at request. We talked about where we would grab drinks afterwards and I suppressed my urge to give my new teammates pointers on their swings. I secretly wanted to stack my team with the best players.

I’m not the only former Sagehen player who has had to adjust. Shortly after Wilson graduated, she too joined a company slowpitch team. That lasted a season—it was too hard to get 10 players to commit to weekly games. But she found another team and kept playing. At first, Corley wanted nothing to do with slowpitch. As a point of pride, she doesn’t even compare it to fastpitch. But after a few months of inactivity, she joined a team to throw and swing again, even though, “it’s not the same level of intensity as fastpitch.”

And that intensity is what we former fastpitchers miss. When I first started playing slowpitch, it was difficult to watch teammates let lazy fly balls drop in the outfield or forget to tag up. And I didn’t have the same pride hitting a slowly pitched ball grooved down the center of the plate. In the box, it took me a few tries to sufficiently slow down the compact swing I had been polishing for years, so as to squarely hit the high arc lob pitch characteristic of slowpitch.

I found my mood fluctuating with the score of the game, my competitive nature sometimes making my teammates anxious. But with time the fastpitch world has felt farther away. Over the last two seasons, playing in games filled with forgotten errors, I have become far less concerned with softball pedigree. Some of my teammates are skilled athletes in their prime, who are as immersed in following Major League Baseball as I am, and channel their energies and competitive juices into slowpitch. Others are less experienced, but still relish the camaraderie that comes with playing for a team of like-minded colleagues. When my team spiraled through a losing streak this season, I found it didn’t detract from light hearted bantering with my newfound friends. We tossed the ball around on the sidelines, chewed over projects we were working on and leisurely took photos of our teammates up to bat. No statistics and no pressure.

For the first time in my recent memory, I could simply play softball for the pleasure of the game and the people around me. Best of all, as I began to adjust to this style of play, some of the old adrenaline came back. I was competing. This season, as I stood in left field, body hunched over, anticipating the ball, it didn’t matter that half of my team were novices, or that they would never understand what it felt like to play fastpitch. This had to become my new experience of “softball,” too—the game I can play throughout the decades of my life until my legs or arms won’t hold up anymore. And so I’m learning to let fastpitch go.

Slowly.

Harry Kingman struck out in his very first at bat for the New York Yankees and, decades later, he would still recall the walk back to the dugout as “long and grim.” His major league career, on the other hand, was short. An athletic superstar at Pomona, where he graduated in 1913, and the first and only Sagehen to make it to the major leagues, Kingman would appear in only four games of the 1914 season—just a historical footnote, really.

It’s what he did with his life after Major League Baseball that was extraordinary. His remarkable career took him to China, where he started speaking out after a student massacre. His willingness to stand up for the voiceless carried on to UC Berkeley and the frontlines of the battle for free speech, civil rights and affordable student housing, then to Washington, D.C., where he was an underdog lobbyist. His work drew the attention of The New Yorker, and words of praise from luminaries ranging from Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi to Peace Corps Director Sargent Shriver.

“We are all deeply indebted to Harry Kingman—such men are almost unique,” wrote Earl Warren, during his time as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. “Few have given so much of their lives to ensure man’s birthright of equality and liberty.”

Kingman’s accomplishments must have surprised people who met the rowdy preacher’s kid in his early years. He was born in 1892 in Tientsin (Tianjan), China, as part of a long line of missionaries. As his father’s health deteriorated and Chinese soldiers began marching by the school where the minister taught, in a prelude to the Boxer Uprising, the family moved to Claremont.

The elder Kingman became pastor of the Congregational Church and a trustee of Pomona College. When Harry rebelled as a teenager, smoking and shooting pool—he could run up to 40 balls in a straight pool—his parents shipped him to military school, where he was expelled for fighting. “I … wasn’t getting along well and I didn’t think I was going to amount to much. I was unhappy, very unhappy,” he recounted in an oral history that reveals a humble man, with a wry sense of humor and strong sense of justice.

At his father’s urging, he attended a YMCA conference where he vowed to change his life. He entered Pomona, where he excelled in basketball, track, swimming, tennis and baseball. Captain of the baseball team, Kingman was dubbed by the Los Angeles Times as “the heaviest hitter ever developed in the southern end of the state.” But he also fell behind in his studies. Once, a professor offered to give Kingman a test Saturday morning to make up for failing grades. If he passed, he could play in the game that afternoon.

“My father and the fans and everybody would be out there at the ball park…waiting to see whether Pomona was going to have Harry Kingman pitching or not,” recalled Kingman, who also played first base. “When I would show up in my suit, you know, they would applaud, and I would be in the game. But it was pretty uncertain.”

On summer break, Kingman worked as an assistant bricklayer on Pomona’s dormitories, climbing up tall ladders and earning 17 and a half cents per hour.

After graduating as a history major, he embarked on his brief professional baseball career signed on by the Washington Senators, then quickly traded to the New York Yankees, who wound up using him a few times as a pinch hitter. He only played on the field once, at first base, notes his biography with the Society for American Baseball Research.

Unsatisfied warming the bench, Kingman left the Yankees in 1916 and joined the staff of Stiles Hall, UC Berkeley’s off-campus student branch of the YMCA, because he wanted to help disadvantaged youth. Yet he was never far from the sport.

A year later, he was drafted and sent to Camp Gordon in Atlanta, where he was captain of the varsity baseball team. The commanding general told Kingman, an infantry officer, to put together the best service ball club in the nation. The general protected the team members, preventing their deployment. World War I ended the following summer and his initial disappointment over not being in combat turned to pacifism.

Victory hadn’t made the world safe for democracy. In 1921, Kingman sailed for China as a missionary and student sports coach. “When I first went to China … I did it primarily with the idea of helping its people. But very soon it dawned on me I had something to learn from the citizens of a nation with a long and respected civilization.”

He sent for his fiancée, Ruth, also the child of missionaries, and their daughter was born in 1924—the fourth generation of the family to live in China. He also began writing short mimeographed newsletters on Chinese politics that drew admiration from novelist H.G. Wells and the British philosopher Bertrand Russell, among many prominent thinkers and leaders.

While playing baseball on a spring day in 1925, Kingman noticed a huge traffic jam on the main boulevard in Shanghai. Police officers in the foreign-controlled section of the city had opened fire on Chinese demonstrators, killing and injuring dozens, including a promising student Kingman coached. In a letter to a local newspaper, Kingman defended the students and their right to protest foreign exploitation, which drew a flood of angry replies from the expat community. Within a month, he was pushed out and transferred to Tientsin (Tianjin), his birthplace, in the heart of warlord country.

It was the first time the Kingmans had come up against such unrelenting opposition, and the experience seared the couple, sensitizing them when they fought years later for the rights of minorities.

In the winter of 1927, on his way back to Berkeley, he stopped in Japan for a month to coach baseball in Osaka. He then returned to the student YMCA, Stiles Hall, began coaching Cal’s junior varsity baseball squad, and worked on social justice and free speech issues that resonated for decades.

Stiles Hall started hosting left-wing students who weren’t permitted to meet or speak on campus. During the Great Depression, he helped establish a housing co-operative where students contributed their labor to cut down expenses. (In the 1960s, Barrington Hall, one of the earliest co-ops, became the epicenter of the Berkeley free speech and anti-war movements.)

From their inception, the co-ops broke down prejudice by allowing different races to live together, unusual in the 1930s. As a Berkeley undergraduate, Yori Wada worked as a houseboy, unable to find a landlord willing to rent to a Japanese-American. “I remember knocking on the doors of houses that had signs saying, ‘Rooms for Rent,’ but the turndowns were universal,” Wada told the San Francisco Chronicle. Wada, who later became a University of California Regent, praised Kingman for opening doors for minorities.

Kingman credited his experience of living as a child in China, playing with black athletes, and the attitude of his parents for growing up without prejudice. “[My father] gave me the idea that people should try to stick up for and help the underdog or the person that is getting a bum deal and that the stronger person should stand up for the weaker person.”

When the United States entered World War II, the Kingmans opposed the government’s evacuation of Japanese on the West Coast to internment camps, with wife Ruth taking the lead. Meanwhile, Harry was appointed as head of the West Coast office of a federal commission to combat racial employment discrimination at defense contractors.

“Their interests and causes had a national and even international focus —racial justice, civil rights— but they had day-to-day impact on the people within their own community,” says Charles Wollenberg, a historian who teaches at Berkeley City College.

Kingman’s niece, Claire Mc- Donald, ’47, who followed the couple into public service for three terms on the Claremont City Council, says Harry and Ruth taught her: “You participate in government if you can. You don’t sit at home and complain. You go out and change the world.”

Kingman retired from Stiles Hall in 1957, but his career went into extra innings: he and his wife formed the Citizens’ Lobby for Freedom and Fair Play—a two-person volunteer civil rights lobby—and moved to Washington, D.C. “We could have lobbied in Sacramento,” he told Coronet magazine in 1961. “But I always liked the big leagues best. That’s where they play the best ball.”

In those years, Kingman was described in a New Yorker piece as raw-boned and sun-tanned, with a gravelly, drawling soft-spoken voice, still moving with an athlete’s grace. Harry and Ruth were oddities in the capital. The two senior citizens living off his pension and Social Security, were beholden to no corporate interests, with no bottomless expense account. They invited guests to “California patio suppers,” a big pot of spaghetti and green salad, served on a red-and-white checked tablecloth and paper plates.

Baseball also helped Kingman find common ground in Washington, D.C., when he coached the Democrats in an annual game against the Republicans. In a class note Kingman submitted to this magazine during that time, he wrote: “We operate on a shoestring, but never had more friends nor experienced a more exciting, adventurous and satisfying experience. This week my friend Billie [sic] Martin, of big league fame, visited me on Capitol Hill, and I had the fun of introducing him around. Senators ganged around him.”

Harry and Ruth lobbied hard for the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. They were at the office doors when congressional leaders first arrived in the morning and the pair kept making the rounds late at night. Opponents, meanwhile, launched into a Senate filibuster that included a 14 hour and 13 minute address.   From the crowded gallery, Kingman held his breath as Sen. Clair Engle, a Democrat from California, was carried in for a cloture vote, a procedure in which the Senate can place a time limit on the consideration of a bill. Ill with a brain tumor, Engle, who could not speak, raised his crippled arm for an affirmative vote—breaking a Senate filibuster against a civil rights bill for the first time in history.

Kingman wept, overjoyed.

His creed was simple: “to be for something or somebody, not merely against,” he told Edward R. Murrow on his famed radio program, This I Believe.

In 1970, the couple returned to Berkeley, where the student co-op he helped to create kept growing. (Today 1,300 student members live or eat at 20 co-ops.) Later that decade, a newly-acquired co-op residence was named Kingman Hall to honor Harry. In covering the dedication, the Chronicle called the then-elderly activist “an inspiration to thousands of University of California students. Harry Lee Kingman has lived the kind of life boys read about at the turn of the century.”

Just a few years later, in 1982, Kingman passed away at the age of 90. “I have never felt like I had any great ability. I’ve known so many people who had much better brain power than I ever had,” Kingman once said. “But I’ve kept on the job…. I’ve never stopped trying to become more effective and to show my gratitude to God.”