A foray into college defense stats

Non-Braves fans often ask me why Jeff Francoeur drives me so crazy. He’s young and powerful and exciting, they say! Well, it’s because of this kind of stuff: For Atlanta outfielder Jeff Francoeur, the search for a more disciplined approach is elusive and the source of occasional torment. Francoeur began this season with loose goals […]

Minor league write Matt Hagen unveils his ongoing Top 100 Fantasy Baseball Prospects.

Because it’s never too early.

Some stathead stereotypes are unfair: very few of them, I have found, live in their mothers’ basements. They’re good with computers and stuff, so they got jobs and rented apartments and bought condos. Sure, those apartments and condos are every bit as sad as their mothers’ basements would have been given the 100% absence of […]

Oh, please oh please be a parody: Sabermetricians. Ugh. It’s like Major League meets Revenge of the Nerds, except the nerds aren’t fun and they think they’re better than you. And Bob Uecker isn’t there to keep things interesting with the occasional witty one-liner. I can’t say that sabermetrics as a statistical form of analysis […]

What works for teams doesn’t always work for players.

Another look at the Black Ink Test.

Ten run estimators enter. One leaves.

If you’re a reader of this blog this kind of thing is not news to you, but it’s interesting all the same: “Computer simulations work pretty well in baseball for two reasons,” said Carl Morris, a professor of statistics at Harvard University who has written several papers that commingled baseball and formal statistical theory. “In […]