Sports would be nothing without statistics. There would be no record books, no historical context, no league leaders. We wouldn’t know how many home runs Hank Aaron or Barry Bonds hit, or that Drew Brees is the NFL’s all-time leader in passing yards with 80,358.
And while looking up numbers like those today is as easy as opening Google, it wasn’t always that simple.
The Elias Sports Bureau blazed the trail for stats long ago and has since grown to become the most recognizable statistics company. As the official statistician for MLB, the NFL, NBA, MLS, WNBA and PGA Championship, the Elias Sports Bureau has every major sport covered when current and historical numbers are needed in a hurry.
Need to know the last player to hit a home run in six consecutive games? The Elias Sports Bureau will find that out. When a catcher hits for the cycle, the broadcaster needs to know how many times it’s been done before by someone playing that position.
From the simplest to the most complex stats, the Elias Sports Bureau is there 24/7 to provide any numbers needed from the major sports leagues in the U.S.
Currently, Joe Gilston is the owner and president of the company, but it’s been in his family for more than a half-century. It was founded by brothers Al Munro Elias and Walter Elias back in 1913 when it was called the Al Munro Elias Baseball Bureau, Inc. A mouthful to be sure, but the company name changed to its more recognizable moniker in 1961. That was nine years after legendary statistician Seymour Siwoff purchased the company from the widows of Al Munro and Walter Elias in 1952.
“My grandfather worked here and ran the company for nearly 70 years but it was originally started by Al Munro Elias as the official statistician of just the National League in baseball,” Gilston told OSDB Sports via phone. “My grandfather started working here as an intern in college. Fought in World War II, was injured in battle, came back and started working to become an accountant by trade, so he got a job with the government. It just so happened at the time that the original founder had passed away suddenly so the company needed a new energy and someone to come in and help keep it afloat and a friend of my grandfather said, ‘You know, why don’t you buy the company and see what you can do with it?’ So he ended up purchasing the company from the estate and a few years later, befriended a guy who ended up being friends with the new commissioner of the NFL in 1961, Pete Rozelle, so we became the official statistician of the NFL later that year and that really transformed the business.
“So we went from being just a baseball company to being both a year-round company and a sports company. So we changed the name from the Al Munro Baseball Bureau to what is now the Elias Sports Bureau.”
Gilston graduated college with a finance and economics degree in 2008 and started working at Elias immediately. His grandfather asked him to join the company and he began in the research department, helping with the day-to-day operations.
“I taught myself to how write SQL code, write code and worked my way up through the company. I worked here for five years and it was a great opportunity to work with my grandfather, see the business that I grew up with,” he said. “I’ve been very fortunate. I’ve had the opportunity to see a lot of great sporting events in my lifetime. Coming up with this business, I knew the high-level of where we were as a company, but really had a chance to work with him and understand the inner-workings of our business. Got to go out to lunch with my grandfather most days. It was really an amazing experience to see what he had built up close.”
Gilston took some time off to work in the business department of XO Group, starting on the data side before transitioning into more of a sales role.
He returned to the Elias Sports Bureau in 2019, purchasing the company from his grandfather about six months before Siwoff passed away at the age of 99.
In his current role, Gilston analyzes what the company has done in the past and works to identify potential growth areas as the sports landscape evolves.
“Most of my day-to-day is working directly with our team to think about existing and future states of our business,” he said.
While Elias has worked with a number of broadcasts and supplies stats to the likes of ESPN and other companies, the early days of the company were all about connecting with the leagues themselves.
Those connections were formed by Gilston’s grandfather, laying the foundation for what statistics have become.
“It really started with my grandfather, who fundamentally believed in relationships as a means to grow and create a solid foundation of the business,” Gilston said. “So he worked very closely with the leagues – and you’ve got to remember, in the early days of these leagues, they weren’t behemoths that they are today. These were smaller companies and he was really working with them to help tell stories with data that helped create the reasons we all watch sports today and keep fans engaged. We were able to do that with statistics and he certainly understood what statistics could do to help enhance the broadcast.”
The Elias Sports Bureau headquarters in New York are filled with old logs and 20-pound books of records, stats and game logs, which were kept before technology and computers arrived. Obviously, all of that data had to be converted from hard copies to digital, needing to be inputted into a computer system that keeps all of the records today.
That transfer was before Gilston’s time with the company, but he fully realizes the work that went into inputting those numbers into a computer and logging it in the database. Fortunately, his grandfather understood the value of the computer when it was released, becoming an early adopter of the new technology.
“One of the ways in which my grandfather helped revolutionize our business is he really understood what the personal computer could mean to a statistics company, so he was an early adopter of the computer when there were probably only a few in the country,” he said. “There was one in the Elias office. He understood what it could mean to the work that we did, but certainly getting it from paper into our system is a process. The essence of that we still maintain today with entry, validation of entry, and then the third checking that comes down the road. It was a painstaking process of database entry in its early form. It happened before my lifetime, thankfully. So my grandfather didn’t have to rope me into that task, but we still do a lot of work. We’ll look back historically and try to go back further in time so that work still exists to this day. We love finding and uncovering new pieces of information.”
As with any business, the Elias Sports Bureau has been forced to adapt and evolve.Technology has advanced dramatically over the years, there are more broadcasts of games on TV now than ever before and content is consumed on the internet significantly more than in the newspaper nowadays.
“As a technology and data company, we’ve evolved significantly from the old days,” Gilston said. “[We have] a backlog and record books of physical paper records. Everything from what is basically a 20-pound book to be able to look at a player’s day-by-day or a streak of quarterbacks with 200-yard passing games. You have to go line by line in an old book to modern day database structure. We’ve gone through a lot of evolutions there. Our business was and still is heavily in the league relationships, but we also had a major newspaper component of our business that has evolved into a TV component. Now it’s everything and more as we think about the future of meeting a streaming audience’s needs or as media outlets evolve and consumer needs evolve.”
As part of the company’s continuing expansion, the Elias Sports Bureau launched its own direct-to-consumer product called the Elias Game Plan. It’s an app on iOS and Android that allows fans to get game-day insights and stats, as well as betting data – a major area of focus for Elias with sports betting being legalized in several states across the country.
“If you think about Elias, our expertise is around contextualizing modern-day events in sports, taking large amounts of data and creating storylines. And so as we think about direct-to-consumer experience, we started into the gambling space, the idea being that sports betting is growing in this country and the opportunity to help fans understand data and stats that could impact their betting behavior or fantasy lineups – so we’re trying to do that in an accessible and engaging way.
“Every league, every media outlet is thinking about what does this mean for us? Elias had to go through that same evaluation. If you think about fundamental changes in the way that sports have been consumed, the legalization of gambling is one of those major changes. Whether it’s a company putting on a gambling-specific streaming version of a game, all the way through to what does it mean for us? In terms of, how do we incorporate these data points into telling stories?”
As a company that operates 24/7, 365 in the sports world, there’s a ton of research being done constantly by the Elias Sports Bureau team, which is primarily located in the Northeast. While there is some planning done ahead of time for something like the Super Bowl or the NBA Finals, researchers are tasked with answering questions and finding data in a flash when a request comes in from someone like Tim Kurkjian or ESPN’s broadcast.
Elias has built a close relationship with individual writers over the years, including Kurkjian, who does a monthly column on baseball oddities.
“He had one recently … the White Sox started three guys in a row in the batting order that their first name all started with the letter ‘Y.’” Gilston recalled. “The Reds had this game a few months ago where they scored the tying and go-ahead run in the ninth on a wild pitch and passed ball. So, he wanted to know the last time that happened.”
The requests go beyond the statistical box score, too.
“I’m a dog person, so I loved this question we got from the night crew pre-pandemic. We had an official scorer reach out to us when it was ‘Pups in the Park Day’ and they wanted to know if the dogs should be included in the official attendance for that game.”
The answer? “If they get a ticket, they’re part of the attendance.”
Gilston estimates that 90% of the requests that come into Elias get answered within five minutes, which is remarkable. There’s a private Slack channel that’s used to fill those requests, another way technology has helped the company grow and evolve.
Of course, not all of Elias’ stats are uncovered by requests from partners. Employees do a lot of their own research to find unique angles and stories, with Angels star Shohei Ohtani yielding plenty of interesting stats.
The remarkable emergence of Ohtani has really shown how much data the Elias Sports Bureau has and how much research goes into the company’s day-to-day operations.
“I feel like a lot of the stuff around Ohtani is super interesting,” Gilston said. “An amazing athlete who’s a dual-threat at pitching and at the plate. We did something recently that was the last pitcher to make a start and going into that start, he had at least a share of the league lead in home runs. Most of that stuff gets into the true history of our company. The answer to that was Babe Ruth. So a lot of Ohtani’s ‘last time this happened’ was Ruth, so that speaks to who we are at our essence, which is that historical nature of sports. So everything we’ve done there is super interesting. Pitchers to hit leadoff. Pitchers with 10 strikeouts and then goes to play a defensive position. All those kinds of things keep us busy.”
As sports have evolved, so too has the Elias Sports Bureau. And their growth will only continue under the new guidance of Gilston with sports betting becoming more widely legalized and technology advancing by the day.
