Outside the Box

Sean Forman's Blog - Baseball Primer

This is likely the last post here for awhile. I direct you to the exact same weblog, but in a new area. I've also changed the name to something very boring as I also have a column of longer articles and wanted to use the OTB name for that. Visit the site kick the tires etc. There is a welcome message there, so you can leave comments there. The comments are set up a bit differently, but the Albert Belle thread points out that some changes likely needed to be made as the page was nearly a MB of text.

Baseball Primer - baseball for the thinking fan

Here you go thinking baseball fans. Our new content site is up and running. Discuss it here, there, or anywhere. We've made an effort to be very open to user comments and feedback, so please send us some and we'll try to be responsive.

By the way, the Albert Belle thread is longest thread I've ever seen on a discussion board resembling this. You guys are on fire!

March 7, 2001 - Albert Belle: Hall of Famer?

Keith Woolner runs an interesting comparison of Albert Belle and Kirby Puckett. I particularly agree that personality is what puts Kirby into the Hall of Fame and keeps Belle out. Don Malcolm has an interesting take on why this is the case. Sorry, but you'll have to wait for when BaseballPrimer.com opens up. I'm guessing on Friday.

Pitcher Usage and Pitcher Abuse Points - Baseball-Reference.com

I've pulled the original article on pitcher abuse points. I am revising it and hope to publish it on Baseballprimer.com later this week. You all will be the first to know. My reasons for pulling the article are given using the link above.

Baseball-Reference RSS Feed

If you are big-time computer geek, such as myself, you might know what this means, otherwise it has no impact on your life whatsoever. Essentially, if you are a website operator you can now get a feed of the latest posts on Outside the Box.

Slow down in postings

Outside the Box is going to move
within the next week, so you will likely see a slow down in the postings. Probably none until the new site opens: baseballprimer.com. I'm excited about the project. It has a lot of neat things going on and I think you will enjoy it. When tied in with baseball-reference.com and some of the really neat things Jim Furtado is doing it's going to be pretty cool.

Pitcher Usage and Pitcher Abuse Points - Baseball-Reference.com

I've spent the whole day working on this article and I finally have it done. You can comment here or you can go to the page and make comments at the end of that page which might be better. I look forward to your comments.

Yahoo! Sports - MLB Minnesota at Boston Box Score

Look! Look! A real live spring training box score. Not one of those crappy little line scores that you can't tell anything from. ESPN.com has boxscores as well, but I prefer the simplicity of a plain text box score. MLB.com has changed the box score to a more vertical format. I don't like it. You can't see all the batting stars with a single glance. Give me the side-by-side comparisons.

Iowa Farm Report And User Generated Comments

I'm still a tad down about the demise of IFR this off-season, but I would lay even odds that it will return next off-season.

That said, something I've thrown out here a few times is the idea of user snips of info on the players. For instance, users could add some biographical data, for instance, during the 1999 off-season Frank Thomas went through a difficult divorce. Or Mickey Mantle wore the number 7, or any of a number of other things.

Why I'm talking about this is that I want to get as much info as possible, and I want to make it as easy and useable as possible. I think that requiring a simple registration and password protection would be the best approach. This way users could make a series of contributions and you could alter or view all of your comments at once and folks could easily see the sum of the users contributions.

One of the frustrations of the IFR was I had this slick means to user contribution, but received very little user input. I'm sure I was way under 100 legitimate comments. I received a lot of illegitimate stuff like "Hey Brian haven't seen you since HS give me a call sometime." or "Derek, I'm Christy from the party. I thought you were cute, call me so we can hook up sometime." I am not kidding.

I tried offering books and other inducements, but I still had very middling input. I realize minor league players are much lower profile, but I'm just wondering what would be a way to induce more user involvement. $.20/comment? If that works too well, my wife might run me out of the house. I could probably swing a $50 gift certificate to Amazon.com every three months. One entry for every comment accepted.

Some of the more popular services that make use of user content are napster which you know about and the CDDB, which houses track times and names for nearly every CD in existence. That's how your computer CD player knows what tracks are on your CD while the CD player in your house doesn't.

All that data is user generated, but the reason the CDDB aggregates data so well is that the user entering the data receives a distinct benefit for entering it, their CD player now displays the tracks from They Might Be Giants' "Severe Tire Damage". It is almost coincidental that the data is uploaded to the CDDB database for everyone else's benefit.

What sort of benefit would a person receive for entering data onto my site other than piece of mind?

Is there a tie-in service that I could provide that people would enjoy? Researchers might like a "locker" to store data, but that is a relatively tiny group of users.

Here is what I'm looking for. For what reason would my brother Chris (a huge Darin Erstad fan) add a comment to Erstad's page mentioning he was a punter for the National Championship Nebraska Cornhuskers in 1994? I'm not sure that a benefit to him exists. I just thought I would throw that out to the list and see if we have any "outside the box" thinkers out there. BTW, any ideas that get mentioned here are for anyone who wants to use and implement them.