Wednesday, January 11, 2006

Self-Indulgence

Be forewarned, this post is all about me and has no baseball content to speak of.

For one thing, the new November, 2005 edition of By the Numbers is out, and it contains an article by yours truly entitled “Finding Implicit Linear Weights in Run Estimators”. It does not contain anything that I have not already posted on FanHome or on my website, it simply exposes some of that stuff to a wider audience. As far as I know I was the first to apply partial derivatives to run estimators (although Kevin Harlow and others now have and Ralph Caola and Ben Vollmayr-Lee apparently did so on win estimators), so I figured I would publish a piece on it before somebody else did. And I’m sure that some people have not heard about it yet. It is also another little bit of exposure for Base Runs, although that usually is a dead end.

Over the past month or so there has been a (relatively) high volume of posts on this blog. If you look at the archives, you will see that this has been an extremely unusual high volume of posts. Do not expect this blog to always have so much new material. The last month’s output was kind of a “perfect storm” in that I had three and a half weeks off of school, lots of ideas of stuff I wanted to write about that had built up over several months, and was sufficiently motivated. Often one or two of these factors will be in place, but it is rare to have a confluence of the three. Also, things like the Win Shares and rate stat series are one idea but are able to be stretched into several posts. Hopefuly I will be able to come up with enough useful content to keep this updated at least every week or so.

I’m not actually sure how many people read this thing, but whoever it is, it’s appreciated. Comments are welcomed and encouraged. I do have comment screening turned on though, so I have to read the comments and approve them before they are posted. I was getting sick of going back and deleting insightful commentary like “This is a GREAT blog. Please visit my richly scented candle website.” It is easier to screen them ahead of time. Any comment that is on-topic will be approved. But there will probably be some lag between you posting a comment and the comment appearing, unless I happen to be checking it that very minute.

4 comments:

  1. "I’m not actually sure how many people read this thing, but whoever it is, it’s appreciated."

    Thanks, and thanks for your posts.

    I found your site from a link at bbpro, and I've been working through your material. Interesting and informative.

    Do you expect to do team forecasts for 2006? I'll be checking back to see.

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  2. Team forecasts? You mean like going through and writing about each team and who's going to play what position? That's not really my cup of tea--I love reading that sort of stuff, but I don't know enough about every obscure player to write one of those with any credibility. Except maybe for the Indians, which I probably will do at some point once spring training starts.

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  3. I've been lurking at fanhome recently and found the link to your blog. I think I've read a few of the articles before when they were linked to Primer, but not all of them.

    Keep up the good work.

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  4. I've been lurking at fanhome recently and found a link to your blog. Keep up the good work.

    Incidentlly, one of the BBBAs came to a similar conclusion about RC/PA. It was either 98 or 00 (those are the two that I read).

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