The writer is normally their gambling writer. Seems like a good fit to explain this kind of thing (better than a beat reporter by miles).

That makes sense. When I was doing sabermetrics books back in the early 1990s, I tried several titles. One year, I tried "Baseball Insight." I got a very polite note from one of my regular mail-order subscribers, asking for me to not use that title, because he published a book with the same title for the gambling audience. He understood that I would not know that, since I'm not into gambling, so he was very polite, and I, of course, immediately complied; Don Malcolm and I changed the title to "Big Bad Baseball Annual." This gambler's book was a sabermetrics book, too, essentially. That's why he got mine every year. He wanted everything sabermetric, because it works. People in gambling want to win. They don't allow themselves to get emotionally involved with a player or team, and so are not upset when they see their hometown boys ranked low. They just figure they can make money off of the locals who don't know and are betting on emotion. If you think about it, that's one serious compliment to sabermetrics. Gamblers want to use it to get an edge. When that happens to your work, you know you're getting results. So it doesn't surprise me at all that a ambling writer knows all about true outcomes and BABIP, and is able to explain them accurately and well. - Brock Hanke

Brock, I was one of your subscribers at the Baseball Sabermetric/Insight/Big Bad, and always enjoyed your work. I've loved baseball all my life --- I'm old enough for vague memories of Ernie Banks as a shortstop --- and had my eyes opened wide by the first mass-circulation Baseball Abstract in '82, long before I started writing about gambling in 1994. The goal of the Sun-Times column is acquaint a general audience with sabermetrics, now that the people who run ballclubs are using their versions. Most weeks, I'll take one stat, explain it, and try to tie it to a Chicago player to give Sun-Times readers a local connection. It's not going to break any new ground in the field, but I hope it'll be fun and informative for the fan who's wondering what this is all about. --- John Grochowski