Taking Over the Blogosphere (well, not really, but it's a dream)

The baseball networks story has been picked up by the Freakonomics Blog.


It's also been picked up by a few baseball/sabermetrics blogs, including a couple of them that are hosted by prominent people in the business. Ones that have followed up on the Wired story include 27pitches.com, The
Book--Playing The Percentages In Baseball, Baseball Musings, and Baseball Think Factory.

I wonder if my dreams of being made fun of on SportsCenter (or at least by Bill James) will come true? ;)


The story has also been picked up by USA Today online and reached #4 on digg.com in the category of sports for a 24-hour period. As usual, the comments in the various venues have included a mixture of intelligent ones and not-so-intelligent ones. (The ones on the sabermetrics blogs have been almost uniformly great. Some of those folks have looked at our actual paper and not just the Wired article and have given some very nice academic-style food for thought regarding some things we might want to consider rephrasing in the paper when it is back on our desks. That is much appreciated!) I especially "love" the ones that expressed extreme moral indignation about some combination of (1) not incorporating PED information into our rankings, (2) not using data to which we just don't have access, or (3) not coming up with results that match their preconceptions. (Um, science isn't automatically wrong if it doesn't give the answer for which you were hoping and/or expecting!)

Oh, and I haven't gotten as much work done during the last couple of days as I was hoping... I really need to work on my scholarpedia article about solitons.

The Article that made Bill James Famous

Courtesy Rob Neyer's blog, here is a link to the 1981 Sports Illustrated article that made Bill James famous. It's also written by Daniel Okrent, who is a very familiar name in Rotisserie Baseball circles.

(For those of you don't know, Bill James essentially invented the science of sabermetrics, which I like to call "Jamesian statistics" (in parallel with Bayesian statistics, etc.).