John Dewan wanted a better answer from baseball

Reggie Jackson had become a nuisance. On John Dewan’s Strat-O-Matic team, the outfielder’s defensive rating kept slipping: first a one, then a two, then a three, then a four. A player could apparently travel from excellent to dreadful without offering his tabletop manager a satisfactory explanation. Dewan wanted one. Baseball supplied opinions in abundance. The measurements required a little more work.

That irritation belongs near the beginning of Dewan’s professional story. He would help build STATS, co-found the business that became Sports Info Solutions, and lead the team behind Defensive Runs Saved. Yet the question underneath those enterprises remained pleasantly ordinary: what, exactly, had the fielder contributed? For someone trained to calculate risk, an unexplained rating offered a useful problem to investigate.

A White Sox education, with equipment included

Dewan grew up on Chicago’s South Side, listening to White Sox games with his father and playing baseball in its many local dialects. There were concrete diamonds, 16-inch softball and games on the front steps. Comiskey Park’s bat-day doubleheaders supplied equipment as well as entertainment. The promotional department was, in effect, helping finance the summer season.

His friends called him Bowie Dewan, after baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn. He kept their Strat-O-Matic league schedules and player statistics. Even in a game invented for recreation, somebody had to maintain the records. Dewan took on that work alongside the games themselves.

At Loyola University Chicago, he studied mathematics and computer science and met Sue, his future wife. An insurance career followed. He earned his Fellowship in the Society of Actuaries, giving his taste for numbers a demanding professional framework. The baseball continued alongside it. The two interests were about to become much less polite about staying in their separate rooms.

The telephone call before the business plan

A fellow actuary handed him a Bill James Baseball Abstract. Here was familiar analytical work applied to a subject he loved. When James proposed Project Scoresheet, a volunteer effort to gather and computerize major league play-by-play information, Dewan called directory assistance in Lawrence, Kansas, to find him. Within a month he was writing collection software. Within a year he was directing the project.

Consider the scale of that decision. A reader encountered an interesting problem and reached for the telephone. There was no invitation to wait for, no credential in baseball to acquire first. His existing skills had found a new assignment. The romance of a career change often conceals this practical detail: somebody still has to write the program.

Dewan joined forces with Dick Cramer, who had already co-founded STATS, and helped relaunch the business. In 1987 he left his actuarial job for full-time baseball work. Sue had left her own job first to help with data collection. A bedroom office gave way to basement offices as the operation expanded. Domestic space had acquired a competing tenant: the national pastime.

Finding a business in the box score

STATS grew during the spread of personal computers and the internet. The company supplied detailed sports information, including live statistics. Its reach extended beyond baseball into football, basketball and hockey. Under Dewan’s leadership, it appeared at number 144 on the Inc. 500 list. A pastime with an appetite for numbers had become an enterprise with customers waiting for them.

The distinction between a finished box score and a live one sounds modest until you imagine being the person refreshing the page. Information that arrives during the game serves a different purpose. It becomes part of watching. Dewan’s work helped put that changing account of a sporting event within reach of people far from the stadium.

The owners sold STATS to Fox Sports in 2000. After his non-compete agreement expired, former colleague Steve Moyer approached him about another business. Baseball Info Solutions began in 2002. Dewan supplied capital; Moyer established the operation in Pennsylvania. The brief was to collect baseball information in greater detail. Having helped make the score available, Dewan returned to the troublesome question of how the game had produced it.

A glove deserves a fair account

Fielding percentage records what happens on the chances a player handles. Range raises a more awkward question: what about the ball another fielder would have reached? A tidy record can conceal a limited patrol. Defense is an excellent place for a reputation to keep its accounts creatively.

Dewan’s plus-minus approach compared the plays a fielder made with the frequency at which comparable balls became outs. Video scouts charted location, ball type and speed. The first Fielding Bible presented the system in 2006. Its premise invited readers to consider the opportunities behind the visible results, including the opportunities that slipped into the outfield without anyone being charged an error.

The fifth volume, published in 2020 with Mark Simon and Brian Reiff, introduced PART: Positioning, Air Balls, Range and Throwing. It separated the effects of an infielder’s starting position from subsequent performance. A well-placed fielder and a quick-moving fielder can arrive at the same ball by different routes. Useful analysis has to make room for both journeys.

The currency of baseball

In 2009, the second Fielding Bible launched Defensive Runs Saved, expressing defensive contributions in runs. That gave the work a unit fans already understood. You could disagree with an evaluation while at least knowing the terms of the argument. Baseball was hardly likely to surrender disagreement merely because someone had improved its arithmetic.

Dewan described the objective as translating the numbers into the “currency of baseball, which is runs.” He also named the colleagues involved: Ben Jedlovec, Steve Moyer, Pat Quinn and Rob Burckhard. When discussing the difficult work on pitch framing, he credited Jedlovec, Scott Spratt and Joe Rosales. His recollections leave room for the people behind the columns.

There was institutional recognition, too. Dewan served on the committee behind the SABR Defensive Index, incorporated into Gold Glove selection beginning in 2013. In 2016 he received SABR’s Henry Chadwick Award for his contributions to baseball research. The child keeping everyone’s statistics had acquired a rather more formal audience.

“I believe in small companies.”

John Dewan, 2006

The publisher who preferred a smaller room

Dewan’s affection for publishing survived the STATS sale. He explored buying its publishing division back, but could not justify the price. Then Greg Pierce, co-publisher of ACTA Publications and an acquaintance from church, called for advice about a departing partner’s stake. Dewan offered himself as a possible buyer. Advice can occasionally become a transaction before the conversation is over.

ACTA published religious books; its sports division gave Dewan a way back into baseball publishing. Working with Bill James, BIS and ACTA continued the Bill James Handbook after STATS stopped producing it. Dewan valued the work enough to find it another home.

His explanation was disarmingly specific. Running STATS with 20 employees had been more fun than running it with 100. Small companies, he felt, could concentrate on a few products and serve customers closely. This is an unusually useful confession from an entrepreneur: expansion can be a business achievement without being the most enjoyable part of the business.

Another kind of return

John and Susan established their foundation in January 2000, following the sale of STATS. Its grantmaking supports education and economic opportunity, including housing stability and employment preparation around Chicago. Internationally, it works through American charities supporting education, jobs and economic development. The geography widened; the interest in making resources useful remained recognizable.

An earlier experience helps explain the direction. After Loyola, Dewan spent three months on a mission in Honduras. The poverty he encountered stayed with him. Years later, he also reflected on his father, a Ukrainian immigrant who worked two shifts at a corrugated-box factory to send his children to Catholic school. Opportunity had a family history before it became a foundation’s purpose.

Through the Ignatian Legacy Fellows program, Dewan became interested in solar energy. His work has included helping Chicago Jesuit Academy and Christ the King Jesuit College Prep pursue solar projects. Dewan Solar now helps mission-driven organizations navigate analysis, funding, incentives and installation. Lower electricity costs can leave a school or nonprofit with more money for the work that brought it into existence.

The next column is measured in kilowatts

The foundation’s July 2026 letter supplies a recent measure of that work. During 2025, it funded and completed eight new solar installations for nonprofit partners, with $1 million in funding. It also provided $277,913 to 28 organizations through its grant programs. Those are distinct activities, and together they show how ordinary grants and longer-term infrastructure can sit beside one another.

For 2026, the foundation set out plans to prioritize solar projects at home and abroad. Dewan Solar’s project list puts names to the approach, from schools to Sarah’s Circle and Family Matters. The intended benefit is practical: money saved on energy can support an organization’s mission over time.

Dewan’s career offers an appealingly consistent habit across some unlikely settings. A board game rating prompted a closer look at fielding. An insurance skill found a second life in baseball. A business sale helped finance opportunities for others. Now a building’s electricity bill is another invitation to look more carefully. The questions change. He keeps giving them somewhere useful to go.