I knew hiring Ted McGinley to run his Career Loss Adjustment numbers was a big mistake.
It’s been a long time coming, but only now do I feel comfortable saying with 100% certainty that Baseball Prospectus is no longer any more credible a source for empirical baseball analysis than any of the mainstream sports media outlets. About the Washington Nationals’ signing of free agent Ivan Rodriguez, BP staffer Kevin Goldstein writes:
If you are the Nationals, who is the most important player on your roster? It’s Stephen Strasburg, and it’s by a country mile. Could there really be anything better for Strasburg’s development than giving him a veteran catcher who understands the game as well as anyone around?…
This contract will be impossible to measure based on the $6 million and whatever Rodriguez does statistically. It might only me [sic] measurable on human factor levels that even the smartest statistical minds haven’t quite figured out.
First of all, this is 100% opinion, not analysis. As Goldstein notes, there is no metric to determine how much, if at all, a player’s performance is effected by another player. It is fine for Goldstein to be of the opinion that having Rodriguez around could be beneficial for Stephen Strasburg, however, Baseball Prospectus has always supposed to have been above unquantifiable statements and baseball cliches such as the benefits of veteran leadership.
...I used to visit ESPN.com for baseball news and then head over to BP for analysis. However, as the two entities have merged, literally and in subject matter, I found myself less inclined to spend money on a site whose content overlapped with one I was getting for free (got an Insider password, holla). I cancelled my subscription to BP last year, as I explained to longtime BP contributor Jay Jaffe after meeting him a couple of weeks ago, because at this point they’re just not doing anything that I can justify spending money on.
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Also, I hate it when people consider that something that can not be proven either way may possibly be true. How dare they!
That's not what he's saying. He's saying that he doesn't go to BPRo for these kinds of unquantifiable onions. He's saying that he can easily get the exact same opinions elsewhere for free, so there's no point paying for it.
He's right.
The post he's complaining about? Kevin Goldstein wrote that for the free portion of the site. So he didn't pay for that!
http://www.baseballprospectus.com/unfiltered/?p=1460
Possible explanations: (1) More money comes from readers who like commentary and fantasy stuff more than from the former area, (2) those writers who excelled in the statistical analysis were offered better jobs elsewhere, while commentators/fantasy guys are a dime a dozen, (3) sabermetrics in general has perhaps reached a current road block in advancement, at least for the "average" sabermetrician who either does not have the ability or time to invest in the novel studies involving a plethora of data that requires lines upon lines of code to process and analyze -- therefore, there are fewer "important" or "newsworthy" articles being published today across them internets (although, see Fangraphs), and perhaps (4) BPro management willingly chose to move in this direction for whatever reason(s).
I do not know if this is true or not, because I am not a BPro subscriber and I never have been, but the way I interpret what he's saying is something along the lines of: "This paragraph by KG is a a good example of what BPRo has become. Instead of posting analysis and interesting articles that are worth paying to read more of, they put up more and more stuff like this: boring cliches that are readily available at a billion other sites."
Just thought that needed mentioning.
A much better example could be found by pointing at anything Carroll writes that isn't about injuries.
Assuming that the Gammons move from ESPN was one of the huge news items that was going to be bigger than any trade or signing that occurred during the Winter Meetings (which I personally don't feel was the case, but maybe I'm not appreciating Gammo's stature within the game), what was the other?
Apparently Blomberg moving in on the stats evaluation business.
Goldstein isn't the problem, though...he IS an expert thought it's scouting and stats, not pure stats.
The problem to me is they have several straight-up MSM journalists writing for them now. That's not differentiated BP content in my view, and that type of content has become the majority of what they offer.
The catering to the fantasy baseball crowd is where the discretionary on-line money is expected to be so any business tries to do it. The writing at Fangraphs clearly demonstrates that.
Or maybe less adversarial. The sabre community has seen its Belushi SNL ride off to greener pastures and only awaits the arrival of Eddie Murphy's SNL>
I also really like Goldstein's Prospect articles. Of course, I use that information mainly to inform my Strat-O-Matic GM'ing, so maybe I'm one of the fantasy players some think they are now focusing on.
Gammons is a terrible analyst, and should never have had that title. However, he has been known for years and years as the best "quotes guy" in the business. The absolute best at cajoling exclusive info from people like GMs. If you read Moneyball (which I don't advise other than for this purpose), you will find a paragraph there where Billy Beane talks about getting a call from Gammons, asking for a fresh scoop. Billy gave it to Peter, and gave as his reason that any time Peter does that, he repays it by telling Billy something that Billy needs to know and doesn't yet. That is what makes for a great quotes guy - not just being willing to make the info trades, but figuring out what info that you know will be new to and help out the guy you're calling now - and Gammons is supposed to be the best at it. That does give him stature within the game.
An idealistic avant-garde forms to denounce the establishment.
The avant-garde, using revolutionary methods, gains a loyal following.
The avant-garde sees this as proof of their righteousness. They continue their work, but with less emphasis on new discoveries and more on pleasing their followers.
The establishment notices. They mock the avant-garde. When this fails, they hire the most talented and/or popular members of the avant-garde.
That's inexact, but you get the point. And in applying that generalization to sabrmetrics, there are mitigating circumstances. Baseball statistics are less proprietary than ever. You don't need to buy a subscription to BPro to know what centerfielder had the best UZR last year, or how much a 3 WAR free agent is worth, or if Jake Fox is likely to rebound next year. You can find all that information for free. And once you have that information, you or any of a hundred free sites can analyze what that means for your team just as well as any pay site can.
Can't they just count them?
+
This
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Me
However, like others have said, they really aren't doing anything that no one else is. And all of the writers who brought new stuff to the table are either employed by teams or moved on to different ventures. Then you're left with the Sheehan, Carroll, and Karhls who I don't find worth reading anymore. It might just be a point where when you initially read them you're seeing stuff you haven't before, but then after a few years you know that stuff, and they just keep saying the same thing and it's no longer new and exciting. It's like taking a college 101 class over and over instead of moving up to the 201 and 301 levels after you get the 101 stuff down. Right now they specialize in 101 writers. (I feel the same thing about Neyer, although I like him as opposed to the BP crew).
That's, presumably, why they did BP Idol.... because they needed new talent. I haven't read the new writers since I'm not a subscriber (for about a year now), but a few of them seemed to write interesting stuff during the competition. The best part was always Carroll saying the analysis was too hard for him to follow.
I actually no longer read anything else on the site.
Back when I was a lad, we'd wear those unquantifiable onions on our belts, which was the style at the time....
I don't begrudge them going pay at all... but once I started spending more time here, the renewal just looked like more and more of a waste, so the time came to pull the plug. I still like Sheehan and Kahrl, but not enough to muster the wallet and effort to keep a subscription current.
I did do a fantasy-only subscription last year - mainly for their projections and the draft day tool, but probably won't do that again. There are more user friendly tools on the market (had loads of trouble trying to use it on auction day) and to be honest, I really didn't get much from their projections or any of the fantasy content.
What I found most frustrating about their roto coverage - this is supposed to be the "in depth" analysis site, yet they focus almost exclusively on the same "10 team MLB universe" leagues... in a deep, AL or NL only league - I couldn't really care less whether Adam Wainwright or Matt Cain is a better bet for the rest of the season. Both players are hardly going to be very available either via trade or waivers. It's the Pirates backup catcher situation or who might scavenge a save or 2 in Washington or which fleet OF might snatch enough PAs to steal a dozen bases that I want. BPro was considerably disappointing in that regard. I was getting much better info for free from Aaron Gleeman and the like.
I haven't read Neyer since he went behind ESPN's registration wall. I haven't read Prospectus since they went pay per view. I appreciate EQA and ZIPS and MARCEL and all of that, but with rare exceptions, I find most of the advanced metrics to be way too far into the weeds. I don't need a huge calculation to tell me that Matt Holliday is better than any other FA outfielder, but not so much so that Scott Boras isn't an ass. I don't need extensive trending to confirm to me that Mike Cameron is a better option than his slash stats would indicate offensively, because he can still go and get the ball with the best of them.
Lloyd Bochner has looked into this extensively.
Ditto.
This place is so far ahead of the rest of the online baseball community it isn't funny. The young guys in particular are complete hopeless.
And that's because it may be the only online baseball community where you've got a large enough base of people, coming from many different perspectives, who critique one another in real time, usually with substantive points. It's hard for complete BS to go unchallenged here for very long.
Did ESPN buy BPro???
Master of Judgement: Me
Projections and stuff: Zym and AROM
Director of Scouting: Emeigh
Statisticians: Walt Davis and GuyM
Lawyer in charge of fighting Boras: Nieporent (fight evil with evil)
Then I'd hire a sounding board of contrarians whose job was to disagree with our ideas. I'm pretty confident we could crush most MLB teams.
This is true for more than just baseball. The late adolescent, early adulthood male monkies, they do not use the big brain that often. We were an idiots when we were 20, too.
I refuse to believe that. Doing so would mean old/pre-reg primer was more juvenile than I remember it.
I can't read Sheehan. I pay for Goldstein, and that's it.
Uh... BaseballPrimer did not exist when I was 20.
I presume I'd be the head of providing the media a constant stream of "Primate Official insults Yankees during Press Conference" headlines.
I'd recommend you for Director of Minor League Ops. You wouldn't have these prima donna types coming out of our system. First guy steps out of line gets it in the neck, everyone else would be pretty ####### motivated after that.
Isn't this why nobody makes money on the internet? There's always going to be someone out there running their mouth for free.
"We have a plan. And anyone too obtuse, calcified in their traditionalism, or brainwashed to see that Roberto Petagine, at age 38 will provide us league average production at a reasonable price has read too much Marriotti. We're also pleased to announce that Bert Blyleven has been invited to spring training; as a public service, we hope to give him a chance to get to that 300 win magic marker HOF voters apparently need.
End Transmission."
Speaking of sounding boards, I get dibs on stadium music. Ha ha Esoteric, Repoz, et al. You snooze, you lose. Redd Kross, Gyorgy Ligeti, and Little Jimmy Scott await the appropriate hitters and situations.
Hire?
Don't you mean just post a thread? People spouting off while they should be doing their day jobs ought to be the first market inefficiency we should exploit.
I'm pretty sure XXX is the only thing that is making money on the internet. And Sean Foreman.
Master of Judgement: Me
Projections and stuff: Zym and AROM
Director of Scouting: Emeigh
Statisticians: Walt Davis and GuyM
Lawyer in charge of fighting Boras: Nieporent (fight evil with evil)
Then I'd hire a sounding board of contrarians whose job was to disagree with our ideas. I'm pretty confident we could crush most MLB teams.
If you give me a job as head of finance (i.e. keeping track of our giant horde of free money from the league), I'll disagree with your ideas for free.
And he comes cheaper than Tony Bernazard!
That's what got me when I heard about the signing. I thought it was pretty obvious what the Nats were trying to do but Rodriguez seemed like an odd guy for that role given that reputation. If I remember correctly he got a lot of credit in Detroit for his handling of pitchers during their '06 run though.
Veteran players get respect in an inverse proportion to how much talent they still have. One of my favorite lines from the new Jackson/Gibson book is Reggie saying basically this same thing. To paraphrase: he says that he thought it was interesting that his reputation for leadership grew as his skills diminished. By the time I was on the A's he said, I was hitting .220 but everyone was asking me for advice. Genius.
Well the point of running the team would be to have fun. Part of my idea of fun is getting paid one million dollars and not working. I think we should command at least as much as Brandon Lyon. We have a much smaller injury risk.
You should know better than to form a Dungeons and Dragons party without a Magic-User or a Cleric. I'm sure that Hee Seop Choi would have been dynamite, though, if he'd only had a +3 Bat of Smiting.
That's great (and a really funny observation), but if you really follow this, you should trade one of the Zimmerman's for Varitek. If he drew respect when his OPS+ was 120, imagine how good he is now. Actually, maybe that's the issue. The respect is so strong it's boiled over into awe and fear, and pitchers can't collect themselves to the point where they can pitch effectively to him.
Or on stone tablets.
It's not a recent development, is it? Wasn't this part of the reason the Marlins signed I-Rod seven years ago?
Or the guy just wanted to vent and he had a blog. I know, that never happens, but just work with me on the theory.
I think they just have a "strategic partnership." ESPN kind of missed the boat here. The statnerd crowd doesn't really care about brands. They go where the insight is. BP today is mostly living on the fumes of creativity from the original group of Law, Sheehan, Davenport, Kahrl, Huckabay.
The stathead community is in good shape from a new stats/research point of view but from an actual writing point of view, it's actually in pretty dire straits. I'm as big a number nerd as anyone, but some much of the writing has become writing about stats rather than using stats to make broader points.
There are literally only 6 people on the internet who have strong stathead credentials and write regularly that I actually seek out to read and are able to communicate ideas without 50 tables and graphs (this definition leaves out guys like Mike Emeigh, who doesn't write very much and Steve Treder, who I enjoy reading but I don't really think of as a stat guy):
Matt Carruth
Jonah Keri
Keith Law
Rob Neyer
Dayn Perry
Dan Szymborski
Now, it may seem weird to have the former stats guy for the Blue Jays and a guy who has a detailed projection system on this list, but they are all writers that write things I actually want to read and are able to communicate sabermetric principles without necessarily using 15 newfangled advances statistics every article.
I don't think it's a coincidence that all of the above writers on the list have been on the scene for a long time or that 4 of the 6 employ their talents with the big players (and that the other two, Carruth and Szymborski, aren't is a crime).
Agreed. If Chris Dial could compose a sentence above a tenth grade level he'd have a paying gig somewhere by now.
It's something that's touch to do as an amatuer. I've written a few short bios for SABR but it takes me some time to do them. I work as quickly as G'n'R did putting together Chinese Democracy. I like to think that I could write faster if I didn't have to worry about a job, but know one is giving me any advances at the moment.
Inspired by Craig Calcaterra, I did start another blog last month (I think this is #6.) My goal was to write one short post each weekday before work. So far, I've been pretty good at it, but it's tough to come up with something original each day. I suppose that's why folks often write links posts.
Jon, I'd suggest finding somebody, or a couple of somebodies, as co-bloggers. It's a lot easier to maintain your originality ratio if you're only posting three times a week instead of five.
It is unfortunate that the likes of a Sheehan or Carroll are presented as having anything to do with this community. They communicate poorly, they have poor people skills, they demonstrate minimal intellectual prowess in support of an idea or argument and actively antagonize groups within the baseball world. That's a powerful way of destroying the credibility of any group.
Which is I was delighted when first Keith and then Sean were recognized by the Writers Association. While Keith can at times be abrasive to read clearly the intellectual engine is there to engage in a thoughtful discussion on a topic. As for Sean he is the antithesis of a Sheehan which means he is a great ambassador for what this enclave hopes to accomplish.
I strongly encourage readers of BBTF to distance themselves from BPro. There are no new ideas that stimulate the discussion and your dollars are being used to support those who would eventually destroy us.
You are helping the terrorists!
Link?
Brandon Lyon on Houston? Now that changes the National League!
AAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!
look here boy i know that the astros have taken the laughingstock title from the pirates/nats by a country mile but you don't hafta rub it in
hasn't my poor husband/kidz/Dogss suffered enuf?????!!!!!
as for b-pro
well, when they went to pay, i quit reading, except for jonah keri's stuff which i read, uh, on someone else's, uh, dime
i like kevin goldstein, but i can't stand will carroll (the definition of pretentious) or joe sheehan and chris kahrl was a bytch BEFORE she became a woman
if i was gonna give someone 40 bucks, i'd give it to bbtf.
I think they just have a "strategic partnership." ESPN kind of missed the boat here. The statnerd crowd doesn't really care about brands.
ESPN didn't miss the boat, ESPN doesn't really care about the statnerd crowd. They didn't form a partnership with BPro so they can get the 20 guys sitting in their mother's basement to click on ESPN.com. They signed up BPro for the content and for the pre-existing customer base of BPro. WGN or TBS doesn't partner with a team because they hope to get all the die hard baseball fans, they do it for the content, the customer base, and the ability to sell air to companies.
While I sometimes enjoy Sheehan's feistiness - it says a lot that e-mail exchanges even over disagreements were usually more diplomatic from Keith Law than Joe Sheehan.
It can be a fine line between sharp and not suffering fools lightly and being just... unpleasant... I think BPro lost most of their folks that recognized that line (at least, most of the time).
Great stuff. Enjoyed the baseball/ethnicity post. Consider me a regular visitor.
That was the beauty of Bill James years ago when I first discovered sabermetrics. His writing was what really compelled me to keep buying his books after the 1982 Baseball Abstract, not the newfangled numbers that he was introducing (not that I wasn't interested in them, of course).
And Mike Crudale
That's the type of thing that I was looking into for another project, but I couldn't really make much more of it than what I wrote down there. A blog is perfect for something like that. Glad you liked it.
I'm confident that Chris could write well enough for a paying gig. I'm equally confident that this would amount to a pay cut for him. Likewise (to pick a few names at not quite random) Roger Moore or David Grabiner or Jeff Drummond (to pick a few of the more talented Usenet writers). Or ... well a pretty fair number of the guys who hand out around here.
I've tried grinding out content. I suspect I could make a living. Maybe. I'm an unfocused dabbler and I think that describes an awful lot of people on teh intertubes.
Yeah.
I would resurrect that particular thread but I don't remember the original topic it was hijacked from.
Steve Phillips' dalliance with an intern.
There was a bunch of those!
Yeah. My interest is driven by events, which is why I'm more often a commenter and the original writing only happens once a quarter. I don't want to wake up every morning thinking "how can I find an interesting way to talk about baseball again today?" I did that as a music writer in the '90s and it jaded me to music for half a decade. No need to go that route again.
There is a huge difference between communicating one on one in a personal situation versus a professional setting.
Sheehan willingly sprays acid without having developed sufficient credibility for others to sift through the snark.
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