Sabermetrics 101

I’m updating a few things finally. The first being the title, which I’ve changed to Sabermetrics 101. I did not really like the first one and a lot of the stuff linked here would not really be classified as a “study.” Plus, I think if this site ever picks up many visitors, it will largely be people who are new to sabermetrics — and the “101″ should fit with that nicely. If anyone has a better title, though, please let me know.

Secondly, I’m going to go through and updating some of the stuff I wrote, either next to the links or on the front page (or elsewhere). Some of it is simply clunky, awkward writing (which is not a surprise coming from me).

I’m also going to add up couple of categories (maybe PITCHf/x) and some links over the next few nights. As always, if you’ve got any ideas, feel free to let me know.

I know I have flip-flopped on this about 3 times already, but I probably won’t be doing much updating here in this blog. If, by some chance, you’re interested in my thoughts on sabermetrics, check out my Padres/baseball blog, Friar Forecast. I want this site to be a stand alone resource site, for the most part, although I’ll still update this on occasion.

As for the site itself, I haven’t updated that much either. I will. There’s no reason not to, really. For someone who is a pretty poor writer, I’ve been doing it quite a bit lately. Combine that with a few other things that I manage to do, and I don’t have a ton of time for this. Anyway, there isn’t much traffic here either way, and this site could easily fade into oblivion in a year or so. We’ll see. Thanks for dropping in.

Tango Tiger has created a wiki page for all things sabermetrics. If you know what you’re doing, go make some pages … that’s the point of the wiki setup, I believe. If not, bookmark the site and go back often when you have a question about something. It could certainly become an invaluable resouce, and it has the advantage of having everything all on one page (on a specific subject), rather than just a bunch of various links as I’ve tried to compile here.

Well, I probably won’t make a “thank you post” to all the people that link to me (not that I expect it to be that much), but I figured I may as well for the first few. Anyway, thanks to Tango for the link on his blog. I’d love to hear any advice from any of you folks coming from over there … obviously, you’re one large portion of the people who I hope can use this site (the experienced saber guys). Any suggestions on how to make things easier on you (or anything, really) would certainly be greatly appreciated, although as I mentioned over there, I’m really not good with the whole computer/running a web site thing. But I’ll try anything that I can. Anyway, take a look around and tell me what you think, if you’d like.

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Searching through the internet over the last few nights, I found the Wayback Machine. Actually, I’d found it before, but kind of forgot about it. Basically, it’s just an archive of pretty much anything that’s been on the internet. It allows me to post things from Primer and various places that I thought didn’t exist anymore (like, for instance, Mike Emeigh’s series on fielding stats). I don’t really know how it works, but the links seem to be functional, so I don’t see any problem with it.

Anyway, maybe I will use this blog a little more often … I’ve just finished up some books (the analysis section of THT, The Book, and I’m about halfway through The Hidden Game …) — all great stuff, by the way — so maybe I’ll throw up some mini reviews here, not that I really have anything to add of substance.

… more links to be added later tonight and throughout the coming days.

Just like to take a second to say thanks to the person who added this site to StumbleUpon. I’ve been blogging in various places for almost a year now, and I’ve never seen traffic like this. So if you’re new to sabermetrics or the site (which is new itself), feel free to take a look around, leave me a comment or email with any suggestions, and add this to your bookmarks if you’d like. I’ll be adding more links over the weekend. Again, thanks for the link and thanks for stopping by.

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.

Just testing this puppy out. If anyone stops by … I’ll be adding links over the next few days.

Anyway, this is just the blog section of this site (that is actually a blog that I’m trying to make look like a regular web site). The blog part will likely not be frequently updated and it’ll be reserved for my little studies if I ever happen to do them, some posts about other studies out there that I find, sabermetric type news, stuff on the site, and things of that nature.

Like I said, I’m just getting this thing started. Hopefully it’ll start being useful in a few weeks. I’m just getting everything out there largely because I don’t know how to not get it out there and because I want to allow any feedback if anyone has any.