The 1998 Statistician of the Year was Joe Webber, for his Chronicle of W.G., a comprehensive account of Grace’s cricketing career providing details of every innings, which shared the Cricket Society’s 1998 Book of the Year Award with Simon Rae’s W. G. Grace: A Life.
ACS President Eric Midwinter said:
‘For his monumental, selfless, dedicated production, breathtakingly comprehensive yet transparently lucid, of cricket statistics’ equivalent of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, no less a sweepingly massive volume than the complete Chronicle of W.G., the Committee of the Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians had little debate in unanimously deciding that the Statistician of the Year award should go, with our profound sense of admiration, to J. R. Webber.’