THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Man, it’s like somebody took a cattle prod to Baseball Prospectus to get them hire some sabermagicians. I wonder who that somebody was.

Very curious timing, bringing back Clay the same week that PECOTA tossed a rod. Lot’s of thrashing around at BP this year. Almost all of the moves have been good, despite some of them smacking of desperation.

If I’m not mistaken, Clay Davenport is a meteorologist. I would imagine (and I could be wrong) that between hurricane season and blizzard season, September-February are hectic for meteorologists while spring is sort of a break. They’ve probably had this planned for a while and wanted to wait until the weather slowed down and baseball picked back up. Perfect timing for him, really.

From the sounds of it, they said he was full-time at BPro now.  So, I don’t think it’s because of any lulls in the weather, if that even applies.

I doubt that meterologists who develop models take a break for quiet weather periods any more than sabermetricians take a break during the off-season.

Hey, like I said, I could be wrong. Really I just doubted the move was an immediate response to the PECOTA feedback so I was theorizing while bored at work (our reporting app decided it didn’t like us and stopped working).

Incidentally, my sister is a Weather Channel junkie and gets as excited about hurricane season as I get about baseball season. Interesting lot, those weather fans.

For the type of work that Clay has done with NOAA, there is no particular storm season for his job—since he works on the entire globe not just the northern and western hemispheres.