Goldmine
No, I’m not talking about the upcoming Bill James book — I’m talking about Tango’s old blog on primer that he’s archived on his site. For someone who didn’t start reading this stuff until 2004(ish) – and didn’t really find Baseball Primer until it was Baseball Think Factory – a lot of it is still new to me. Anyway, I’ve stumbled across these archives a time or two, but never really found my way back, for whatever reason.
I believe something happened with Primer and the links broke, but Tango has his blog and all the discussion on his site, tangotiger.net (check the link above). There are something like 350 archived posts there with many comments from some of the titans of sabermetrics. For someone who is new to sabermetrics, I’m going to guess it’s an essential starting place, perhaps after you’ve been introduced to some basic concepts. For someone like myself, who is still relatively new to sabermetrics and often doesn’t understand what the heck’s going on (and also surfs random baseball blogs at like 3 in the morning), it’s truly a goldmine of information and great discussion.
In terms of incorporating things like this in to the archives I’m trying to make here — well, that’s kind of difficult. I’ll certainly try to extract some of the best threads, but there’s no practical way of tracking down every relevant word that’s been written about sabermetrics over the past 15 or so years (and even beyond that, in print, of course). At some point, the quantity of links would hurt the quality of the site, as anyone would likely become overwhelmed. Anyway, on that note, I’m still very interested in any suggestions you may have, if you happen to stumble upon this place. For now, though, I’ve got some reading to do.