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Tuesday, January 31, 2012
This is a followup to BPro’s Between the Numbers. The intriguing sabermetric articles seem to be:
2.How Does Age Affect The Amateur Draft? (Rany Jazayerli)
2.Are Relievers Being Used Properly? (Colin Wyers)
4.What Has Pitchf/x taught us? (Mike Fast)
1.Is It Possible to Accurately Measure Fielding Without Shoving a GPS Device Up Derek Jeter’s Ass? (Colin Wyers)
2.How Do We Value Hitting vs. Fielding? (Dan Turkenkopf)
1.How Did Jose Bautista Become a Star? (Colin Wyers)
2.When Does a Hot Start Become Real? (Derek Carty)
3.What Is the Effect of the Increase in Strikeouts? (Christina Kahrl)
Thursday, January 26, 2012
The word of the day here is: options!
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I know people are going to complain about the typos at some point. Seriously, try editing something. And then re-edit it. And then re-edit it again. Tell me how many typos you find on the third pass through per page. Multiply that by 300 or 600 text pages. It’s scary how much stuff can get through.
This is not a novel that takes a year from manuscript to finished product.
I said this before with regards to The Book, but I’ll say it again. The worst experience of the book process was the editing. The way we did it is that one guy wrote a chapter, and the other two edited it. It was perfect. We went chapter by chapter, fixing all the errors, and then bundled it into a book. And how many errors did we find the first pass-through of the bundle? Over a thousand. This was AFTER we did the chapter-by-chapter corrections! I was so deflated after that. Here I thought, we were almost ready for production, and boom, that happened.
Those were all corrected, and we had a second pass-through. We were in the hundreds of errors. And then a third pass-through. I can’t remember how many pass-throughs we had. At one point, we simply said: we’re going to stop now.
So, hats off to all the editors out there. It’s a thankless job, like being an umpire.
Friday, December 02, 2011
Looks interesting. And as a bonus, new articles too.
I know I’ve often thought about doing a “Best of” of my blogs and articles, but it’s a fairly daunting task. So, good job to Ben and the gang for doing all the hard work on it.
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
My favorite annual publication by far.
If you want to support studes and the gang, just following the purchase instructions at the bottom of his article.
Thursday, October 20, 2011
Mike did a bang-up job on PITCHf/x in the THT Annual a couple of years ago, and studes has made it available for free for the public (pdf). Tremendous stuff.
There are two other must-haves as well in book form. Dave Allen did one (I don’t remember where), and I think John Walsh or Harry Pavlidis did another. Heck, there might even be more, and I don’t remember.
In any case, thanks to studes for opening up the vault on this one. I’m looking forward to getting the new THT annual. This will be the first one where I haven’t contributed something in a while. I think I wrote in each of the last 3 or 4.
Wednesday, August 03, 2011
The Hardball Times is looking for new areas of research to publish in this year’s Hardball Times Annual. If you’ve got some research you’ve been working on (or have wanted to research but haven’t had the motivation), THT might be interested in your work.
Please contact Dave at if you’re interested.
The Hardball Times Annual is the #1 place to get the best that sabermetrics has to offer. So, I’d encourage many of the contributors of my blog here to write for them. Kincaid, Millsy, etc. Lots of great talent out there, and you’ll get a couple of bucks for your trouble.
Monday, August 01, 2011
Emma Span has the number one baseball literature on Amazon.
If someone has a sabermetric review, feel free to post.
Friday, July 15, 2011
I agree with The Game.
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
Great stuff:
As with The Extra 2%, interviews will form the backbone of the book. Charles Bronfman and Pierre Bourque, Tim Raines and Dave Van Horne. Bill Stoneman and Dan Duquette, Pedro Martinez and Rodger Brulotte. Rusty Staub and Andre Dawson, Felipe Alou and Vladimir Guerrero. I’m anxious to talk to all the principals who made the Expos the Expos for 35 years. As a journalist, I’m consumed by a desire to learn more about the life and death of the franchise. As a die-hard Expos fan, I just think it will be really cool to break bread with Casey Candaele.
I want to know what the management team was thinking when they hired Tom Runnels, even though they had Felipe Alou in the minor leagues. I hope to g-d Keri can devote an entire chapter to that.
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Patriot on James’ Gold book.
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On a related note:
I worry about the future of Sabermetrics and it’s appeal to the masses. It seems that much of what I see today is 1 of 2 things. First, something like pitch f(x)where it seems like an attempt to impress a MLB team into a job. Or second a mathematical exercise, binomial distributions, Bayes, regression etc. Most of these things are god awful boring.What happened to asking an interesting question, and then figuring out how to study it?
Asked by: rempart
Answered: June 11, 2011
Well. . .I’m boring enough myself; I shouldn’t talk. It was my theory, in the 1970s, that since sabermetrics could not sustain itself with academic funding, for the field to succeed it would have to speak directly to the public, therefore would need to avoid the kinds of language and expression that are common in academic circles. I’ve done all that I could to discourage sabermetricians from talking to one another in a way that shuts out the public, but honestly, I don’t know that I have reached a lot of people on this point.
Reader rempart says “god awful boring”. Well, I agree, some of it is god awful boring, which is why I don’t read those. (Anything with regression as the piece de resistance is god awful boring, and I will skim that article.) But, rempart, why do you read those? I am overwhelmed by the number of interesting questions being asked and the research to support it.
I also don’t accept Bill’s conclusion. There is tons of great articles that are public-accessible. There’s no reason all of it has to be, but there are enough saberists out there that do a good job of reaching the public. I personally don’t try to do that, but sometimes I will try (like the ESPN articles). And, I hear from more than one person how they prefer that I do NOT try to do that.
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Then another reader noted in an article:
By: ‘Monahan’
The recent question in “Hey Bill” by rempart concerning the future of sabermetrics helped me recognize how I’ve been following this discussion on both sites. It simply boils down to… Bill’s explanations are both simpler and clearer. I certainly respect the work put in by Tango (whose pedigree is unquestioned), but I find his explanations to be inaccessible-- I’m not a mathematician, I’m a baseball fan. While Phil seems able to fully square the two viewpoints, I see one that makes sense to me and another that does not.
This was in reference to this article I wrote. I responded:
Bill has a different audience than I do. Bill writes for himself (and whatever readers he wants to reach), and I write for myself (and whatever readers I want to reach, which is smaller than Bill’s audience). And I am quite content with whoever I happen to reach. The way I see it, I’m inviting people into my world, rather than going out to the world of others. If that means I get 10 people, then that’s 10 more than I had a minute ago.
***
We all have different objectives. Some write for clarity, some write for precision, some write for accuracy, and some write for entertainment. Some write so we learn, and some write to inspire. There’s a whole bunch of reasons.
And whether we get paid or not is a huge reason for what and how we write. Patriot in the above expected more accuracy from Bill James, especially since he paid for it. He doesn’t want a tidy clean mess that he has to clean up (even though we are all actually better off for it). Monahan however prefers that tidy mess, because he prefers clarity to accuracy. Bill has often said he simply puts his ideas out there, and they live or die on their own.
Me? I’m just a caveman. I’m scared and frightened of cleanliness and regression. These things confuse me. But, if you have a chance to use Bayes theorem with a valid prior (or PythagenPat), so we can bypass the shortcuts even if it will overwhelm the reader, you do it.
Wednesday, June 01, 2011
BJOL readers:
Bill, Do you have any recommended baseball books or websites for a bright 7 year old who is just getting intersted in baseball and says he wants to be a sabermetrician when he grows up? What did Issac like at 7? Is there a Bill James for kids somewhere?
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Sabermetrics for seven year olds? Why not just encourage him to read baseball books. I liked the John Tunis series when I was that age. Or maybe it was some other guy… who wrote “Good Field No Hit” and “Long Ball to Left Field”.
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On a personal note, I started getting into baseball when I was 7 (1977-1978) and began collecting baseball cards… I became really interested in the stats on the back of the cards and then found the 1969 Baseball Encyclopedia at the library around 10 years old, which was like finding a gold mine. I started reading the Abstracts when I was 14. 7 is not too young to enjoy this stuff.
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Just a comment re seven year olds. My nephew is 7, lives in Alabama, and follows the Braves. Immediately upon learning of the Posey injury, he said “I guess Eli Whiteside will get a lot more playing time now.” He plays simulation games with his dad and can name the entire roster of the 62 Yankees. He studies the game cards looking for every edge.
When and how do you become a saber-zombie? For me, the first moment was probably when I saw the Plus/Minus figures in The Hockey News Yearbook. I was probably 10. It could also have been when I played my first Table Top game (Extra Innings). Around the same age. I also collected baseball and hockey cards at the same time. At some point, I guess I got interested in the tradeoffs and player comparisons. Then there was a Baseball Digest article on Linear Weights, comparing Robin Yount and Dwight Evans. That led to Hidden Game, and somehow I also ended up with Bill James Abstracts when I was a teenager. In between there, I used to collect the Who’s Who (red cover).
But before all that, I played baseball (or softball) and (ball) hockey a lot as a kid. That, I think, would be the first thing to do, to make sure that given the choice between playing and reading, that the kid would rather play. And given the choice between watching a game on TV or reading about baseball, that the kid would rather watch the game. It has to be a part of you first. Otherwise, if he holds more interest in reading about baseball than playing and watching, then it’ll be something that he will dispose of at some point.
If he wants to read, the library is filled with far better books than those about baseball.
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Speaking engagement for talked about http://www.gelfmagazine.com/gelflog/archives/varsity_letters.php” title="author">author.
Steve addresses the issue of turnover at Prospectus, with reader comments there and also here.
* Wow, there continues to be lots of turnover here at BP…
* While I understand that some turnover is a necessary thing (and perhaps even a good thing) at BP, I am becoming alarmed at the number of fine contributors here who have left in 2011. What’s going on, BP?
* I have to say, even though I’ve enjoyed a lot of the new writers, it is a little bit worrisome that almost all the long-time BP-ers are leaving.
Now that I am editor-in-chief of the big Beta-Pi, I had planned to say a few dramatic words about the nature of the comings and goings that have attended our operations over the 15 years we’ve been here writing about baseball. Yet, now that I am here with the keyboard under my fingers, I find that most of what I had planned to say is unnecessary. You all have almost certainly experienced the same kinds of changes that we have, and for the same reasons, at your own places of work.
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BP has changed greatly over the years. Of our departures, some left for their own reasons, and there was not a thing we could have done to keep them no matter how hard we tried. There were others where it seemed clear that it was time for a parting, so when they spoke of leaving we acquiesced. The reasons for our feeling that way might not have been obvious to you, but it was inescapably clear on our side of the curtain. In both cases, our hands are often tied—you really have to want to work here at BP; it requires certain sacrifices, and that can be tiring. Sometimes a guy just wants to move on. Sometimes he gets a job offer from the Milwaukee Brewers.
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I described four kinds of partings from BP above: (1) writers we could not keep, (2) writers we would not keep, (3) writers who failed to meet basic standards, and (4) writers who, for whatever reason, failed to establish an audience.
Monday, May 23, 2011
Last year, I suggested:
Huckabay once told me that the vast majority of the articles are read when they are “new”. That is, a tiny minority of articles are read via searches or archives. The main benefit of the BPro articles is that they are read fresh.
Seeing that the older articles have limited value from a subscriber standpoint, and they would have tremendous value from a research perspective, can’t the older articles, say those more than one year old, be opened up to the public?
In addition to having limited loss of value to current subscribers, you get these benefits:
- hits from google search
- free advertising for potential subscribers
Furthermore, BPro’s contributor’s agreement has some IP on it that allows the author to republish his work after 6 months or 18 months or something. Dan Fox for example likely saw it my way, because he would republish his old articles on his blog. Rather than Dan republishing on his blog, I always thought it would have been better for all concerned to simply open up those articles.
I’m not sure who at BPro championed it, but thank you!:
Baseball Prospectus, owner of BaseballProspectus.com (BP), today announced it has made its entire archive of premium and fantasy content over one year old completely and permanently free to the public.
Hundreds of original articles from 1997 through 2010 are now available to the masses and will serve as a source of information to baseball analysts everywhere for years to come.
“It’s our way of saying thank you to the Internet for making our work possible over the years,” said Dave Pease, a partner at Baseball Prospectus.
Thursday, May 19, 2011
I agree with Patriot that the Neft/Cohen layout was by far the best layout of the encyclopedias. I have never liked the phone book layout (listing everyone from A to Z in that order). Neft Cohen instead listed the stats by year-team. In addition, they did show the career line for each player in the A to Z format… but they did it by “era”, which was another brilliant way to show it.
As for electronic and print, and the value of one over the other: it’s clear that print has some value. Sometimes you know exactly what you want and exactly where to find it. I can open up a book, and go right to that page, just on memory. That’s one thing that printed books have over the other forms, the tangible memory. That’s probably why I can remember Bill James’ Baseball Abstract writings from 25 years ago, but not his electronic writings from 25 days ago. As an example, I know exactly on which side of the page he talked about Wade Boggs and some Redsox teammate, and which one of them hit more singles. It’s a photographic snapshot in my mind. Maybe I’m weird like that, that I’m an oddball, and most people don’t have their memories work in that manner.
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As for inferring demand based on posted prices on Amazon, I wouldn’t count on that to mean it’s mostly demand. For example, the first edition of The Book is selling for over 100$. There’s no reason for that, especially since the current edition is a reprint edition. I’m sure it’s some automated pricing scheme that is not that good.
Monday, May 16, 2011
Looks like the authors have a high pedigree. An excerpt is at GQ focusing on everyone’s favorite gasbag, Keith Olbermann.
Useful reminder: when buying stuff at Amazon (whether The Book or not), use the link at the top left corner of any page. Amazon gives us a small referral fee, at no cost to you.
Monday, May 09, 2011
This fellow reviewed three popular books, and came away appreciating each for what it delivered.
Wednesday, May 04, 2011
Featuring Keri, and others.
from Amazon
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