Outside the Box

ESPN.com - Major League Baseball - Two master sabermetricians give their take

There's hope, though. Eventually, I suspect that some enterprising individual will establish a huge web site devoted to sabermetrics, wherein the great work done over the last three decades will be brought together in a systematic, comprehensive way. That'll be a major step forward. And you know, we're about due for a major step forward, because the last major step forward came in the 1980s, when Bill James wrote his Baseball Abstracts and powerful personal computers became affordable.

I often wish there were 48 hours in the day. Something that might, I repeat might, make what Rob Neyer is talking about possible is a baseball website set up like Slashdot.org or Kuro5hin.org. Something like this could become a self supported research community for baseball. It would be a place where folks could post research results and then have comments made. The source code running these sites is all in the public domain, so you could knock yourself out doing this. If you have a server available for this, I might even offer free advice. ;-)

I've told some friends before that their true calling was to run a Baseball Journal, but I suspect the amount of money to be made doing that is less than what can be made in the Baseball book business.

The people who should be doing this are the Society for American Baseball Research (by the way, say hi to me come July if you'll be in Milwaukee for the convention), but I'm not confident in their willingness to be open and nurturing to the population at large. A site with an easy submission and review process and a kick ass indexing service could make pretty good headway.

It can be tough to get contributions from the community at large. My effort at community involvement at the Iowa Farm Report never took off, but part of that is because I was distracted by Baseball Reference.com and never nurtured the site. It's very unlikely that I'll update it this offseason for the first time in five years. It's a real shame because I finally had a design and implementation that was easy to use.

I've meandered here, but it's late and my gullet is full of sushi, so I'm not in a real focused writing mood.

Oh, the best part of the article is that Voros's comments have drawn out two heavy hitters, Craig Wright and Bill James, who, some might argue (perhaps even me), have deserted the field of sabermetrics when we could use some people with their heft and experience.