Tuesday, June 09, 2009

This is...uh...interesting...

Barry Codell developed Base-Out Percentage, which was essentially the first of the many bases/something ratios, and the first bases/outs ratio. While I have written about this proliferation before, one certainly cannot blame Mr. Codell, as he was the pioneer. While I have my issues (explained in the link) with these metrics, there is no doubt that outs are crucial, and Codell was one of the first to take them into account, and may well have been the first to explicitly make them the denominator in an overall offensive measure. So I'm not here to criticize Mr. Codell or bash BOP.

However, the creator of this new website, BarryCode.com (which features Codell's statistics and some of his articles), is just a tad over the top in his devotion: *Compiled by IBAR: Individual for Baseball’s Absolute Recounting. Barry was the first; we "Barry Coders" are naturally next. Not to be confused with SABR, IBAR seeks not to join the group, but to be "a one"! - see S. Kierrkegaard "Maieutic Baseball". Codell's recounting inspires us to tell a different tale, a baseball history, itself uncovering missed mystery, with "something new to say about every player who did ever play..."

I'll leave the question of how much of it is cheeky and how much of it is serious up to you. I'm sticking with "...uh, interesting..."

4 comments:

  1. I'm glad you recognized Mr. Codell was the pioneer of BOP. Most of those comments on the site are meant to be cheeky, but that does not take away from the fact that the site, even if you are not a base/out afficionado, has one of the greatest baseball search engines out there for either Traditional or Codell statistics. Things like National League Left Handed Hitters who hit .300, with 40 HR's and 100 RBI's? You get results in under 2 seconds, and if a statistic involves math computation, the site lays it out on a platter for you.

    Also, this is one of the first sites to show the financial efficiency of a player, as referenced by the MoneyBOP. 2 guys may both have a translated base to scored runs tally of 100, but you only had to pay one of the guys 10,000 per run translated versus 500,000.

    For those who like to see the relation between Codell and Traditional stats, there is a hybrid option on the search engine which allows you to search for players who had a 1.000 BOP, 100 RBI, etc.

    Thanks again for referencing this site.

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  2. This is the creator of BarryCode.com, Don Sevcik checking in. I was directed to this site yesterday by one of the Barry Coders. I love the blog you've put together.

    I laughed hysterically at your devotion comment. I'll try to cut back on the energy drinks in the future thereby avoiding further Kierrkegaard references.

    Keep up the great work on the blog, and have a wonderful day.

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  3. Thanks. Perhaps your comments stood out because a sense of humor is so often lacking in baseball analysis. It certainly is on this site :-)

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  4. One thing I was not impressed with is the speed - I tried clicking on some of the links and gave up while it was processing my request - and I've got a fast internet connection.

    As far as I'm concerned pre-generated web pages beat databases when you're putting stuff on the web. Obviously, you can customize your request a lot more with a database...

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