THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

I did always wonder what my name would sound like on HNIC.  MacLean was very nonchalant, like everyone should know what Corsi is...But I guess he spends a lot of time reading hockey blogs.

And he even called you Gabe I think.  Yes, very non-chalant, like I somehow missed the whole saberist revolution in hockey going mainstream.

And there was no Harold Reynolds there to laugh at “numbers”.

The first time it happened, I was actually at hockey and got off the ice to a blackberry full of emails about it.  The best part was at our firm’s Christmas party that year, I’m sitting and chatting with one of the partners and he says: “You won’t believe this, but there’s a guy with a blog about the Oilers with the same name as you.  I saw his site on HNIC.”

CBC’s been very interested in what’s come out of the blogs.  I suspected for a while that MacLean was a reader before he confirmed it on air - there was an instance where he asked an obscure question about whether the Flames had opened a bar to generate non-CBA revenue that I was pretty sure came right from me.  It’s amazing how different it is from the reaction of the leading members of baseball media to the blogs and such.  There are a lot of Canadian media types who are less open to it but it’ll be interesting to see whether the CBC pushes it further.

McLean has always seemed to have the youthful angle, either because he has to be Cherry’s antogonist, or he has no problem taking on the big boys.  I mean, the John Ziegler episode was classic stuff.  (That on YouTube?) That Ziegler, with his ridiculous charts, etc. 

Anyway, you just need one visible champion.  Neyer could be that guy for us, but he’s not the iconic figure that McLean (now) is.

Well, we’re getting there apparently - Elliotte Friedman, the guy who butchered my name - is a notoriously avid blog reader and has linked me from his own Peter Kingesque Monday column before.  The problem at the moment is that getting into the hockey stats stuff sort of requires you to have a working knowledge of discussions that have taken place across about twenty different internet sites over the past eight years.  It’s somewhat difficult for latecomers to get caught up without serious effort.  As I recall, I was able to slide back into the baseball stuff in 2004 a lot more easily than I think getting into the hockey stuff would be.

Awesome!!!

@Tyler - it’s actually not so bad.  You’ve got Tango and company linking to the best places, thanks to the sabermetric union; I’ve bookmarked your site, Gabe, the Contrarian Goalie, I keep up with Tom Awad and co. at Puck Prospectus, I get to others when I can… all within the last couple of years.  In fact, I find myself wishing that Eastside Hockey Manager ‘07 could calculate Corsi and Goals Vs. Threshold.

It started with (true story) Greg Ballantine of The Puck Stops Here.  (I remember having the politest argument with him over whether Manon Rheaume should be in the International Ice Hockey Federation’s Hall of Fame.) Then there’s non-sabermetric but great hockey sites like Chris Botta’s Point Blank (Islanders), Steve Ovadia at Puck Update, Black Dog Hates Skunks (that man can write).

There’s too many good ones to list.  This is a golden age for hockey blogging.  I wish the actual NHL were run as well.