About

Erik – Founder of PAH9

I moved to St. Louis when I was 8, back in 1987, and I grew to love Ozzieball. 10 years later, I moved away from St. Louis to attend a Bible College in Tulsa, OK, where I met my wife, who is from Iowa. I convinced her to marry me, she convinced me to move to MLBlackout hell. I work a relatively uninteresting office job and I’ve had the good fortune of being able to write for FanGraphs and the occasional article for ESPN.

I feel under-qualified as a baseball writer and an analyst. I’ve been blessed with good fortune, and in the past I’ve been diligent. The diligence part has fallen apart since the birth of my second child and an increased involvement in my local church.

Steve – Contributor

I’m a transportation simulation analyst by trade (the pesky day job) who grew up around the game of baseball.  I played from Tee Ball though high school and at that point burned out a little.  Not wanting to play anymore (not that I was big time, but could have played somewhere in college) I picked up coaching immediately.  I coached American Legion baseball (4 yrs of Junior and 4 years of Senior) up until the birth of my son last year left no free time to continue coaching.

Like I said I’m an analyst by trade so I naturally gravitate toward sabermetrics.  I picked up on the discipline by starting out reading VEB and eventually matriculating to Beyond the Boxscore and The Book Blog.

If anyone wants to contact me to collaborate, ask a question, or anything else I can be reached at steve dot sommer05 at gmail dot com.  For the budding saberist, I don’t have all the answers, but am happy to help with what I can.

Andy – Contributor

Growing up, I hoarded the baseball cards of Ozzie Smith and Ray Lankford.  Although I played baseball throughout childhood, I became more interested in music and mostly ignored the Cardinals in high school while I concentrated on bass guitar instead.  In the summer of 2004, I had a horrible warehouse job that isolated me from friends since I had to work overnight (sometimes 12 AM – 12 PM).  This left me with little social life and led me to substitute Cardinals games for time normally spent with friends.  Although initially depressing, at some point this custom became comforting and my fandom (if not fanaticism) was reborn.

I started gravitating towards a sabermetric understanding of baseball while taking statistics courses en route to a graduate degree in clinical psychology.  Right around that time, I discovered VEB (and Larry Borowsky) and was fascinated by the intelligent conversations taking place there.  The empirical process of questioning previously held ideas to arrive at a more accurate, reality-based understanding of the game was very appealing to me.  It still is.