On February 20 the Web site Baseball Prospectus scooped the dailies by reporting that Cubs starting pitcher Mark Prior was having shoulder trouble. Cubs GM Jim Hendry and manager Dusty Baker initially denied the report. “You can’t believe a report unless it comes from us,” Baker told the media the day after the story appeared. “If it doesn’t come from us, it doesn’t count.”
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Mark Prior was Baseball Prospectus’s biggest story of the past year. The second biggest was Kahrl herself. When she was living in Chicago, where she helped assemble the Baseball Prospectus staff, she was Christopher Kahrl. She moved to the D.C. area in 2000 to work for a sports-book publisher, and the following year she decided to change genders. Currently a preoperative transsexual, she’s been living as a woman since 2003. She first went public about her sex change in August, when she used her new byline on a piece about the Oakland Raiders in Salon.
Kahrl informed many of her colleagues of her decision via e-mail in 2003. “No one expected this kind of revelation,” says Rany Jazayerli, a Naperville-based senior writer. “After I got the e-mail, the first thing I did was call her. It was not my position to agree or disagree with what she did. The best thing I can do as a colleague is to understand what she was going through. The only concern we as a group had was, ‘How is this going to affect us in baseball?’ Baseball is a fairly insular sport and we were becoming well-known in the industry. What would people think when word got out?”
Kahrl is an Oakland A’s fan, but in Chicago she attended between 20 and 30 games at Comiskey Park and a half dozen more at Wrigley Field, each season. She still takes in Sox games when she visits; last July she and Silver took part in a U. of C. alumni trip to Sox Park, where they spoke on Baseball Prospectus’s performance analysis method. “We broiled in the sun watching [Jose] Contreras perform an homage to Steve Trachsel in terms of taking his time between pitches,” she says.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Charles Steck.
