THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Wow, that’s about 3,000 hits a day ... congratulations!

Although I don’t have any frame of reference, that sounds like a lot of freakin hits. What exactly does that mean anyway?  There must be a lot of folk who read but don’t post, which is fine (and understandable since the threads tend to be technical).

BTW, most of the credit goes to Tango for starting this blog and keeping it going.  I don’t know how he does all the stuff he does and still manages to raise a family (his wife must be pretty wonderful ).

Also, I am uncomfortable with any sort of “congratulations.” I don’t do anything for props, let alone this!  I do this because I like it and want to - purely selfish reasons.  I generally can’t stand when people bask in their accomplishments and accolades.

And let’s not kid ourseves.  We are not feeding the hungry here.  We are feeding our own meaningless obsessions.

I’ve got a good daytime job, which makes it easier to do what I do as long as I can maintain my alias.

It’s not really that much hits.  As Phil points out, that’s 3000 times a page is requested from our server each day.  We have about 1000 unique visitors each day.  So, on average, you get 1000 people to come here today, they’ll putz around for a few pages, and go somewhere else.  In a month, we probably have 10,000 to 20,000 unique people, so probably something like 100,000 unique people have visited this blog in the last year.

The Hardball Times and Baseball Prospectus are, I dunno, 20x to 50x that.  And baseball-reference is 100x that.

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Oh, and I agree about the “patting on the back” thing.  I didn’t really post that to celebrate it as an accomplishment toward us.  It’s really a reflection of the community out there.  There’s about 30-50 or so regular posters (at least once or twice a month) on this blog, but far more who are passive.  It’s just interesting to me.

Long time reader, first time poster.  This is about the only thing I feel qualified to post about.  I did math contests in middle school but was an English major in college so about anything above basic statistics and college algebra (if that) is over my head but I can understand the concepts behind the analysis even if I cannot perform the analysis myself. 

I really like this blog because it tries to put a concrete explanation on something that I know I know when I watch a game (like platoon splits, managerial decisions and such) but cannot prove.  I was a history minor in college so I like to go back to some of the historical data you guys dig up and see that, yeah bunting with your number 2 hitter there was a bonehead play or sending this tired pitcher out there to face this middle of the lineup for a third time in a one run game is a bad idea.  Even when the results turn out positively in a particular situation, it was still a mistake.

I will now condescend back into anonymity.

FYI: Seven months later, and another million page requests.

FYI: Four months since post 5, and another million page requests.  That puts us at 3 million page hits.  That’s quite a progression.

We also have over a thousand threads since we started almost two years ago, which is about 10 threads a week.

Just FYI again.  In a few days, we’ll be at 5 million page hits.  That’s about 6.5 months after we got 3 million page hits.

So, our current rate is about 1 million hits per 3 months.

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Also, nearly 1500 threads in about 130 weeks, or 12 threads a week.  I always thought I would do a recap of the threads, but, it becomes increasingly unlikely every day.  Maybe whenever I retire…