Wednesday, April 17, 2013
Granillo: “Rise of the Robot Umpires”
(www.baseballprospectus.com)
It troubles me that the world is just one big rip-off of Ferro Lad.
Read More...We’ve all thought it. Heck, many of us have even said it. Watching the exploits of Eric Gregg, Phil Cuzzi, Jim Joyce, and so many others, it’s hard not to believe it at least once. “We want robot umpires!”
A new project by Dan Levy is working to explore just what might happen if baseball ever heeded that call. Rise of the Robot Umpires is a graphic-style novel set in the not-too-distant future where the commissioner finally ...
Reader Comments and Retorts
Go to end of page
Statements posted here are those of our readers and do not represent the BaseballThinkFactory. Names are provided by the poster and are not verified. We ask that posters follow our submission policy. Please report any inappropriate comments.
1. Boxkutter posted on July 05, 2012 at 12:09 PM # hit 0 | hit 0Not if this sentence is an example.
Grandpa's rich, but he's not that rich.
I self-edit and re-read every thing I right, and Id be pretty embarrased my writing is as unprofesional as many of the Fangraphs article.
Clearly not.
How many layoffs?
You mean, they could bother creating some mainstream stat that isn't a laughingstock instead of WPA, fWar, etc? Maybe they could find the time to actually bother creating a stolen base WPA stat(one of the few things WPA is good for, and they don't bother to track it)
I didn't know they wrote articles?
Hopefully this means fangraphs will carry THT's database of stats, including(if they still have it) their versions of win shares. Neither site is particularly friendly when it comes to looking for stats, but Fangraphs is slightly better.
WPA is a laughingstock? Huh. Last time I checked it as a fun little thing that had zero predictive value but that showed major momentum shifts in games and the guys responsible.
As for the rest of your post, I just don't agree with any of it. Fangraphs is a great for looking up stats. It's not so great for articles, as most of them are content farm style posts, and not particularly deep digging.
Only if you like to pretend that BB-Ref doesn't exist...
They both are excellent IMO.
As noted in the announcement, THT gave up its stats years ago & has been using Fangraphs for that ever since.
I know this was a joke, but the problem was actually that THT was short-staffed on technical and publishing people, and can benefit from the Fangraphs people pitching in.
Sure, B-R is more extensive, but at least with Fangraphs I never had the urge to consult an owner's manual.
They're both great, but I use them in different ways. I have found Fangraphs useful because it shows current players major and minor league stats on the same page, along with their ZIPS projections. It's been a nice tool for playing fantasy. BB-Ref is unparalleled for viewing every detail of a player's career, grey and black ink, and digging into batted ball data, etc.
I find B-R easier to use than FanGraphs in that regard. FanGraphs used to have a nice little "glossary" option with their stats and a little pop up would tell you what the abbreviation stood for. Much of their stuff is pretty obvious but for those of us who don't automatically remember what "Z-Swing%" vs. "O-Swing%" is it's nice not to have to look it up every time.
You've got this backwards. At B-R you can hover your mouse over an abbreviated stat header and it gives you a description of the stat. At Fangraphs it doesn't even tell you the name of the stat. Like, what the hell is, to pick a random metric, Rdrs? With minimal effort at B-R I know it's "BIS Defensive Runs Saved Above Average. The number of runs above or below the average player was worth based on the number of plays made. This number combines the Rpm, Rbdp, Rbof and Rbcatch numbers into a total defensive contribution." At Fangraphs I'm left to look that up on my own.
You must be Registered and Logged In to post comments.