F.C. Lane was born October 25, 1885 near Moorhead, MN but spent his childhood years on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts. A Sabermetrician long before there ever was such a thing, Lane performed a variety of odd jobs while attending Boston University, then worked as an assistant biologist for the Massachusetts Commission of Fisheries and Game. However, his career plans changes when he was diagnosed with "weak lungs", then spent six months in a remote cabin on the frontier in Alberta, Canada. When he returned, he found a job with the recently founded Baseball Magazine, published in Boston, MA, and worked there from 1910 to 1912, quickly rising to Editor-in-Chief. He then moved the publication's offices to New York City, where he continued as editor from 1912 to 1938, as the magazine became a great success.

He wrote probably close to a thousand detailed articles on baseball's technical side as well as interviews with stars at home in winter. Among his sabermetric insights, he was the first to devise a basic "run expectancy model", i.e. a table predicting how many runs would on average be scored from a given situation of outs and men on base. This was only rediscovered by researchers decades later after falling into oblivion, but his figures turned out to be extremely close to those devised by later researchers using computers and thousands of games' worth of data. In tribute, SABR republished his book Batting in 2001 (it had originally come out in 1925).

After retiring in 1937 from Baseball Magazine's editor's chair, he returned to Cape Cod for the remainder of his long life. He headed Piedmont College's History Department at Demorest, GA from 1941 to 1943 and established a journalism program there. He traveled extensively with his wife Emma, whom he married in June, 1914.

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