February 10, 2012
Now Available for 2012 THT Essentials: Now Available The Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2012, an annual "must buy" for all baseball fans, is now shipping. Read this article to learn more about it.
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Thursday, February 18, 2010The true life story of baseballsWhile I was doing some research on a related topic this morning, I ran across an entertaining article from 2005 about the usage of baseballs during a major league game. These little behind-the-scenes stories of the game fascinate me for some reason. Complete listing of top prospectsJoe Hamrahi of Baseball Daily Digest has provided us with a spreadsheet of a compilation of prospect rankings from various sources of each organization. The ranking are separated by division in the tabs below. Just a quick overview of the spreadsheet shows that there appears to be a general consesnus among the sources over the top prospects but slots five through 10 for each team show quite a bit more variation among sources. As Tango mentioned on his blog, this would be excellent if we could get a year by year ranking of each organization's top prospects dating back as far as possible. This would allow us to reflectively look back and compare prospect rankings over the years. If anyone has access to this type of data please pass it along. That’s link-tastic!Some of the more interesting things going on around the interwebs: -A free player injury database courtesy of Josh Hermseyer. Let me echo the rest of the known world when I say thanks, Josh. -Three really cool interviews. One with new Jays GM Alex Anthopoulos and the other with the Senior Quantitative Analyst for the Cardinals, Sig Mejdal. Oh, and NoMaas talks to Brian Cashman about his rapping abilities. -Tired of those young saber kids talking in that slang you just don't understand? Well, you can either tell 'em to amscray or find out just what they're talking about. -DRays Bay has an amazing 129-page annual out...and it's free! Well, what are you waiting for? -Why in the world did American baseball players wear swastikas on their caps during the 20th century? The incredible answer. -Jonah Keri and Bloomberg Baseball have gone live. - Jeff Sullivan has a plan. -Want to learn more about salary arbitration? Jeff Aberle gives some great insight. -Our own Jeremy Greenhouse digs in and looks at the Verducci Effect. -The best college hitters since 2007 in a great format. On staying off John’s LawnI get where John Sickels is coming from. I echo some of his sentiments, some of his hesitancy to embrace the newest of the new in today’s metrics. I feel a little bit over my skis in today’s sabermetric community. I may write for a sabermetrics-focused website, but like Sickels my training is distinctly non-math related. I work as a broadcast engineer for a television station, My college degree is in Electronic Media, which most schools call Mass Media. I spent many more days in college sitting behind an audio board, editing video, or trying to sound less wooden than I normally do when introducing a smooth jazz track for the student radio station than I ever did assembling and sorting spreadsheets. When my wife recently took a statistics class that is a requirement for the college degree she is pursuing, I was only a small help. You will not find me building my own new metric. It isn’t in my skill set. Fortunately it is not the reason Dave Studeman keeps me around. My role here is to write relatively lightweight, fun to read articles, mostly highlighting the game’s weird outliers and poking fun the metrics we still see listed in the paper and have been around since US presidents wore full beards. It is low hanging fruit, but I enjoy it. I started writing the Awards because it was an article that I wanted to read and nobody was doing it at that time. So with all that being said, it probably comes as little surprise that when a website rolls out a new statistic, I generally follow along pretty well during the introduction and I can generally glean a bit from the conclusion, but get a little glazed over in the middle section because I lack the math chops to grasp all of the methodology. As we have collectively gotten more sophisticated in our metrics, my outlook has slowly morphed to reflect what I feel about most medical information. I know what the kidney’s job is, but I would look awfully stupid if you asked me for specifics about the mechanisms that filter toxins from the blood. And I think at a certain level, I think that is fine with everybody involved. I don’t begrudge people who want to improve on existing metrics and factor in new knowledge to produce more precision. As we learn and as more tools become available, we should refine our methods of measuring the game. We can’t stand still. I support those efforts and the websites who work on this effort both rhetorically and monetarily. That being said, I ask for two things from those who build new metrics. One, have patience with those who share your sensibilities, but not necessarily your skill set. And two, when you introduce a new metric or write a piece of analysis based thereon, make it a point to go out of your way to write for both the math majors and laypersons alike. Do your best to explain in simple terms how you are improving on previous efforts, how you are looking at a problem in a different way. Make sure everybody can grasp the intro and the conclusion, even if the middle section is a bit of a blur. I would wager that how well these concerns are addressed has a significant effect on how much traction a specific metric holds the attention of the saber-friendly public. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||