Talk:Elias Sports Bureau

Untitled
i worked there from 1988 to 1989. Kingturtle 04:18, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

Suggestions

 * 1. Who is the CEO of ESB. Is it still a privately-held, family-owned company?  Where is ESB headquarted? How many employees does ESB have?
 * 2. As the official statistian of major league sports, are the leagues paying ESB to maintain their data? How much?
 * 3. How is the data collected?
 * 4. I know that some stats in baseball only go back so many years. Are employees tasked to backfill information from box scores?

Ratings and rankings
The footnote on compensation for Type A free agents mentions ratings and rankings. Are they the same? For example, is a ranking of 65 better than 70, but a rating of 65 worse than 70? -- Margin1522 (talk) 14:32, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

Early history
Today I replaced this paragraph entirely.
 * Al was such a huge baseball fan that he began keeping track of statistics in the National League. Through the years, sportswriters began using his information. In 1922, National League president John Heydler hired Elias to aid him in record-keeping. Several years later, Elias Sports Bureau became the full-time baseball statistician for the National League; the American League followed suit later.

The AP obituary says NL and IL statistician for more than 20 years, as of 1939, which fits the IJSHOF biographical blurb on Al Elias. "Full-time" cannot be right. It would be nice to know the source for that "aid in record-keeping", which rings true as one step toward "contracting out" to Elias. --P64 (talk)
 * Two obituaries available by online subscription, NYTimes and Hartford Courant, together with the three sources listed here will be useful for writing Al Munro Elias. --P64 (talk) 23:14, 3 April 2010 (UTC)