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All about The Hardball Times

Following is a list of questions you might be asking yourself about the Hardball Times. Such as...

What is The Hardball Times?

The Hardball Times is a bunch of guys who like to write about baseball. The site was founded in the early spring of 2004 by Aaron Gleeman and Matthew Namee (Bill James’ research assistant at the time). Aaron and Matthew also recruited Dave Studeman (from Baseball Graphs) to help create and maintain the site.

The fundamental idea was for The Hardball Times (THT) to be a robust baseball website, featuring outstanding commentary, analysis and research. It was not conceived as a blog but an edited online magazine, with several long articles each day. Aaron, Matthew and Dave were among the ten founding writers. Here's a link to our very first article. We have published over 10,000 articles since.

Yeah, but what are you guys about? What's your mission?

In fact, we do have a Mission Statement. Here are the key parts:

The purpose of The Hardball Times is to provide entertaining and insightful baseball writing, aimed at the average baseball fan. The core of THT will be its diverse team of writers, who will cover a wide range of baseball interests from specific team commentary, to fantasy leagues, transaction review, baseball history, and other areas as they are identified.

Our first staff meeting. Aaron is the guy who looks suspiciously like Alexander Cartwright, in the top row, middle. He had just cracked a joke.

Very impressive. So who's in charge now?

Aaron and Matthew are both long gone, but Dave is still around and he's the primary manager and owner of THT. Joe Distelheim is our Chief Website Editor. Nick Fleder runs our Fantasy site.

Are you guys any good?

We like to think so. Our work has been cited by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and Sports Illustrated, among other mainstream media types. We've been leaders in sabermetric, PITCHf/x and fantasy baseball analysis. Our historical writers, such as Steve Treder, have done amazing things re-imagining baseball's past.

A number of our writers have been hired away by baseball teams and mainstream media. Aaron and Craig Calcaterra both write for NBC Sports. Carlos Gomez used to write about pitching mechanics on our site; now he's a minor league coach for the Diamondbacks. Josh Kalk was one of the early Pitchf/x analysts and was hired by a major league team based on the exposure he got here. Mike Fast now works for the Houston Astros. A number of our writers have also consulted for major league teams.

A few years ago, the TV show NUMB3RS ran a show about a baseball geek who used a mathematical formula to prove that a certain baseball player was using steroids. The geek (who was a dead ringer for David Gassko) wrote for a site called "The Boxscore Times." Mere coincidence? I don't think so.

Aren't you really in it to make money?

The Hardball Times raises money in a number of ways, including subscription services, site advertising and books. We use all of our money to cover our costs and pay our writers and editors a little something for their hard work. We don't keep any profit--all cash is distributed to those who contribute regularly to the site. We like to think of ourselves as a bunch of baseball commies.

But it does take money to run this site and money can be hard to come by. If you'd like to support THT, we sure would appreciate it. You can buy our Annual, subscribe to THT Forecasts, buy a hat with a THT logo on it or just donate something to the cause through Paypal:

We're commies, but we're greedy commies.

Forget the Internet. I'd rather read a book.

You're in the minority on that one, but we're also lovers of the printed-on-paper word. In fact, the Hardball Times has been publishing a baseball Annual since its very first year. We self-published the first Annual in 2004 (you can read about it here) and ACTA Sports liked it so much that they offered to publish our Annual themselves. We said "yes, thank you" and we've been publishing with ACTA ever since.

We followed the same format for several years. The first half consisted of original baseball commentary and research (the first Annual included a number of reprints from the website, but they've been all original material ever since). The second half was a comprehensive list of baseball stats for each team, including our patented "batted ball stats," which are not available anywhere else.

In the most recent Annual, we reduced the height and width of the Annual to make it easier to manage. We also cut down on the stats in the back of the book, since there are so many stats now available on the Internet. We kept the same number of articles and research.

There is terrific content in every THT Annual. You can backorder any of them from ACTA Sports.

Got any RSS feeds?

Sure do. Here's our primary RSS feed, but we have also created lots of specialized RSS feeds, depending on what you want to read:

You can use our RSS feeds to stay on top of our postings in RSS readers, such as Google Reader or Bloglines.

If you subscribe to Facebook, be sure to sign up for THT's Facebook Page. We also have several feeds on Twitter. You can subscribe to our articles at http://twitter.com/#tht6 and you can follow all of our writers' tweets at http://twitter.com/#!/dastudes/tht.

What's your privacy policy?

The Hardball Times only collects information from you necessary to make the site work. We only store basic information in our database, such as your name and email address, and we don't store sensitive info, such as your credit card number. We will never, ever share this information with anyone else.

Occasionally, THT may place cookies on your computer in order to facilitate the posting of comments, logging into THT Forecasts and other assorted things. Cookies do not attach to your system and damage your files. If you do not want information collected through the use of Cookies, there is a simple procedure in most browsers that allows you to deny or accept the Cookie feature.

Okay, give me some of the highlights.

Oof. It's pretty difficult to pick out the best of 10,000 articles. But allow us to point you to a few things, and maybe you can go from there.

• Aaron Gleeman remains THT's archetypal writer. One of his more popular pieces was Old Man Franco.
• Steve Treder has been our Baseball Historian in Residence from the very beginning, and he has written many wonderful pieces about baseball's past. He has created Baseball Times Machines, identified horrible moments in franchise management, talked about the crossroads at third base and ranked all major league teams by the quality of their farm systems, year by year.
• Dave Studeman has also been with THT since its sinister origins, and he has worked extensively on batted ball analysis, Win Shares and Win Probability Added. For a while, he cranked out a regular column called Ten Things I Didn't Know Last Week, which proved inexplicably popular. He also accidentally invented WPA game graphs and xFIP.
• David Gassko joined the crew in our second year and has contributed a wealth of original analysis ever since. These include more batted ball analysis, the impact of player size on performance, and how leagues have improved over time. He also invented Pitching Runs Created.
• John Brattain, who also joined in our second year, was a generous friend and tremendous writer. Unfortunately, John passed away in 2009 and our pages have not been the same since. To get a sense of his unique voice, read And Let the Screwing Continue or Who wants to subsidize a billionaire?. Or maybe See windmill...tilt at windmill...rinse, lather, repeat. John invented the Pujols Awards and railed against baseball ownership on a regular basis. He is very dearly missed.
• When we went looking for someone who could cover the business side of baseball, Brian Borawski stepped up to the challenge. He's been writing a weekly column called the Business of Baseball Report ever since. A devoted Tigers fan, Brian particularly enjoyed interviewing Ernie Harwell for THT. Maury Brown also contributed to our business pages for a while.
• Geoff Young was a long-time commentator at THT, starting in 2006. Geoff is a diehard Padres fan who sometimes can't forget the dark past or ignore the good times. But he knows his baseball, and is equally comfortable writing about baseball's past and its future. His ode to Ken Griffey Jr. was one of many highlights.
• Jeff Sackmann contributed to THT from 2006 to 2010. Like Geoff, Jeff is a baseball generalist, but his sweet spots are the college ranks, minors and prospects. His work on college splits is cutting edge and he's also written about scouting reports and how college hitters mature, among many other things.
• Dan Fox graced these pages for a year before moving onto Baseball Prospectus and eventually the front office of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Dan created his initial baserunning analysis for the THT Annual.
• Carlos Gomez wrote for us less than a year, following his time at Baseball Think Factory, but it was a memorable time as Carlos virtually created the format for online pitching mechanics analysis. His take on Jake Peavy is a good example.
• John Walsh has been a crack researcher for THT for many years. Some of his research has included sacrifice flies, left-handed batting and outfield arms. John was also an early Pitchf/x adopter, investigating pitch types and umpires.
• Josh Kalk was our first Pitchf/x Analyst in Residence. Before being hired by a major league team, Josh wrote about league-average pitchers, release points and pitch sequences.
• Harry Pavlidis and Lucas Apostoleris are now our in-house Pitchf/x experts, though many of our writers have their hands in the data. So much data, so few hours in the night...
• During 2009, Craig Calcaterra brightened our site with his Shysterball blog. Craig continues to contribute to THT via his daily "And That Happened" column, the single best gameday summary anywhere.
• Tuck contributed Toons to the Hardball Times for several years, proving that pixels can be used for many types of creative expression.
• Our history department now includes Bruce Markusen, Richard Barbieri and Chris Jaffe. All specialize in finding nuggets and new perspectives on baseball's past.
• And the rest of our current contributors, listed on the left, continue to create new classics every day.

Guest contributors have included Bill James, Tom Tango, Sean Smith, Greg Rybarczyk, Don Malcolm, J.C. Bradbury, Dave Cameron and MGL. In the left-hand column, you can search THT and also scan articles by category, author and month.

Oh, and I haven't even talked about our Fantasy Baseball writers. We first started a separate Fantasy blog in 2007, anchored solely by Fantasy Wunderkind Derek Carty. Our Fantasy stable has since grown to include nearly ten terrific (and obsessed) fantasy experts contributing fresh new content every day. We provide day-to-day advice on standard topics such as trade targets and hot pick-ups, but THT Fantasy Focus also prides itself on original, trend-identifying analysis, and coverage of strategic perspectives on league play and design. Here are some highlights:

• Derek Carty’s imprint on THT Fantasy Focus is indelible, and his greatest hits are too numerous to list. He’s researched the effect of player build and their ability to maintain stolen base production, investigated the predictability of save totals, and created a slew of stats to help better understand and predict player performance.
• Derek Ambrosino focuses on the strategic and ethical aspects of fantasy baseball, including league construction. Some notable pieces on these areas include his excoriation of the head-to-head format in high stakes leagues, a discussion of the imperfect nature of the fantasy baseball trade market, and perspective on restricting trading privileges of non-contending teams.
• Patrick DiCaprio was one of our most entertaining writers, often interpreting fantasy baseball through established strategies in various other fields from military battles to yacht racing. His piece on defining expertise is one of the most clear, succinct, and well-written takes on the subject.
• Marco Fujimoto has explored various sociological and psychological dynamics as they relate to the act of trading in fantasy baseball.
• Jeff Gross is an outside-the-box thinker, also known for his informative and humorous quips via Twitter’s @THTFantasy. He has offered simple methods to create auction values for players, and his own metrics for evaluating pitcher performance.
• Michael Lerra has done some great work around determining the predictability of various stats, and how to best allocate your team’s strengths across categories to maximize wins in head-to-head leagues.
• Jonathan Halket is our resident Roster Doctor, who is happy to analyze your specific roster based on the unique design and dynamics of your league. If you’re in need of a house call, you can ring him up here.

Yeah, yeah. Where are your stats?

For six years, we kept our own in-season baseball stats, updated daily on the site. We concentrated on both standard and sabermetric stats, and we were pretty proud of the way they were laid out. We also maintained team stats and graphs, and also updated them daily.

However, we made a budgetary decision in late 2009 to no longer carry stats on the site. We miss them, but Fangraphs and Baseball Reference have done such a terrific job that we feel our time is better spent on other things. In fact, we now have a linking agreement with Fangraphs, in which all of our player links send you their way and they feature our content on their site.

Can I write for the Hardball Times?

Absolutely. We're always looking for new writers, and we welcome guest pieces as well. If you'd like to write for THT, send us an email or just fill in the contact form below.

I'd like to give you guys $10,000. How do I contact you?

Fill in the following form to contact us about anything, from references to complaints. Regarding the $10,000, Scott Boras will get right back to you.