Ye Olde Moneyball: "The time has passed when the public will any longer swallow the palpable falsehood that a home run is no better than a scratch single." (PDF) Before Brad Pitt; before Michael Lewis, before Billy Beane; before Bill James; and long, long, before the Society for American Baseball Research, there was F.C. Lane. The editor-in-chief of Baseball Magazine for 30-odd years, F.C. Lane also wrote a book called Batting and lots and lots of articles about baseball. Several of them presaged the rise of "sabermetrics" more than half a century later (via MetaFilter).