Brock For Broglio: 6 Questions With Shawn Hoffman of Squawking Baseball

“Just an excerpt of the Q&A:”

Q. Peter Gammons mentioned your blog as part of his regular reading, what does that mean to you?

A….I think the article you’re referring to is further proof that the world is shrinking very fast. We started this blog in September as a self-indulgent way to hear our own voices, and a couple months later Peter Gammons is mentioning it in his column.

Q. Can you tell us more about The Data Project? Where do you see it going, and how can we use it?

“What we want to do with the Data Project is collect any and all financial info we can, but with a particular focus on league and team data. The benefits of this kind of project are almost endless, but the main goal from a sabermetric point of view would be to improve existing Marginal Revenue Product calculations. This would allow us to put a real price on free agents, draft picks, etc. The systems that exist today are far too general to have any real meaning.

Right now, we’re determining what the best platform would be to make the data publicly available for people to use and contribute to. There are several new open database sites that have wiki functionality, but we want to make sure we have the best possible framework before we move forward.

Thanks to BFB