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Baseball Primer Newsblog — The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand Monday, January 16, 2023How a Group of Message-Board Misfits Changed Baseball
NaOH
Posted: January 16, 2023 at 08:03 PM | 32 comment(s)
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Tags: baseball prospectus, gary huckabay, history of baseball stats, sabermetrics |
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1. NaOH Posted: January 16, 2023 at 02:24 PM (#6113360)prd
they all got their wish with the final chapter of their books - How To Make Winning Baseball Games Boring As Heck With Increased Strikeouts and Minimal Action
yeahyeah, i know. gotta get them kidz offn mah lawn
I don't think it's controversial to say that there can be tension between what is statistically optimal and what is broadly aesthetically pleasing or most entertaining. It would seem logical that the stewards of this form of entertainment would try to align those incentives so the way to win IS the most entertaining product, but baseball has been painfully slow to even try to sync up those interests.
Haha, right!? "RM", where the names changed but the initials were always RM. Did anyone ever find out what the deal was with that guy?
And the relevant acronym, SDCN -- Stat Drunk Computer Nerd
that was a shame to see that about gary.
this is narcissism, but i was struck by similarities between what was mentioned about various people in that piece and where i was at the same time (sleepwalking through grad school, spending most my time modeling baseball stats in the lab, running a scantron machine part time, doing comedy on the weekend to make a few bucks, etc...). granted, they impacted baseball and i did not (nor did i try to, nor is it likely i would or could have). but, like, that's who i was and would have been absent usenet (where i mainly lurked), not something rsb and the like manifested in me ... maybe it says something about a zeitgeist more than it does about the people who came together to do that thing, like these changes were going to happen at that point regardless.
Surely overstated but suggests that the key role of the "nerds" on the outside was to disseminate stuff beyond proprietary control in a way that educated other teams about what the As (and maybe another team or two?) were actually trying to do, thus speeding the process of copying. But once Beane's lieutenants started getting hired out, the cat would have been out of the bag anyway
*You would think the Castellinis would figure out they would actually make more money if they at least tried to win, but they haven't yet.
A specific group of nerds, sure. But nerds generically are responsible.
But there are always going to be best teams. It would be nice if the overall product wasn't wretched.
Really sad what happened to Huckabay physically.
I turned 58 at the end of last year, Gary is 57. You read about these things and as my Russian barber says, "we all wish for many things, beautiful things...when we are unwell, we only wish for one thing."
Such a tragedy what has happened to him but he's probably lived the best version of Huckaby he could've been and that's to be greatly admired.
I think it's really not clear anymore that this is true. Or at least you probably have to win a lot to make it true. Every team gets their $230 (or whatever it is exactly these days) in common/shared revenue plus half their local revenue. It doesn't take a lot to generate $80-100 M in local revenue and running a baseball team isn't all that expensive -- on a per employee basis, I assume it's a very expensive industry but it simply doesn't have that many employees. Anyway, if you're bringing in at least $270-280 in revenue every year and the league will let you run a $60 M payroll, that's a lot of extra money in the owners pocket. Since you only keep half the local revenue, from that point for every extra $1 you spend you need to add something like $2.20 in local revenue to make it worthwhile. It seems unlikely that Wil Myers (1/$7.5) adds $18 M in revenue.
I wondered, too, and even asked in the comment section of The Athletic article, but nobody responded. I'm pretty sure none of the RLM names were real and the initials may not have been either. I think he was interviewed for and quoted in a "SDCN vs. their antagonists" article once, but I don't remember where and even there he probably hid his identity. All I remember is he was Canadian and a Jays fan, or claimed to be.
The Internet used to be a lot more fun.
The causality probably went the other way.
My recollection is that recreational sabermetricians started going pro mostly after Moneyball the book and especially Moneyball the movie. The BPro crowd seemed more focused on the career pipeline, so maybe a bit earlier for them. Before that, the state of the art was probably more on the recreational side.
While I miss that, it was never a viable business plan, and most of those companies who gave away stuff to generate new customers no longer exist. People who provide content want to eat, just like the rest of us.
The story ends up being more about BPro than rsbb or even Primer, but at the time BPro was founded, the amateur stuff was the best stuff out there. In fact, a lot of the early Primates came here from the Rob Neyer comments section, because *that* was one of the best places to go for people with a saber bent.
2003 when the book came out is more likely a lot more accurate of a year for when things got serious in baseball. Even in the book Michael Lewis talked about companies full of baseball nerds trying to sell their services to clubs. 2003 is also the year BPro went premium. Somewhere between 2003 and 2011 ESPN.com created a paywall as well and then I think eventually just gutted the site of content creators
The book was actually timed pretty well -- it was describing a revolution that was already well underway, but hadn't penetrated the public consciousness yet.
I thought his nickname was "E5"?
Anyway...the good old days.
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