This Blogmas experience proved to be a fun, engaging, and informative project. I wasn’t sure how it would go, but I’m glad I dove in and made it happen.1I’ll be switching back to my weekly schedule on December 26.
On Baseball Statistics
Baseball statistics have always engaged me. I would read the sports section of the paper, comparing the statistics of league leaders every day. It was fascinating and exciting that we had a way to measure how good a player was in a clear way.
These days, I’m thrilled by the broad availability of data and the many pockets of baseball communities that freely share and use statistics. Everything I covered over the last three weeks have become common elements of online discussions, eventually trickling down to cable broadcasts watched by casual fans. Websites like Baseball Reference, FanGraphs, and Retrosheet accumulate raw data that is well-organized and searchable. Stathead is a user-friendly database explorer geared towards the sport of interest for those who don’t have the inclination to use more powerful tools. For those who are interested, you can download information (including some full databases) and unleash the power of programming to explore greater depths.
It’s an amazing experience, reminiscent of what I love about using Linux. Baseball is unique among all sports in both the community surrounding it, and the kind of data it generates that is easy to track and work with. It made it such an obvious choice to write about, and I’m glad I have these posts to reference in the future.
On This Project in General
Full transparency: I finished the last proper statistic post earlier today, December 18. My goal was always to finish early, ideally even before I flew home for the holidays (although I didn’t quite achieve that.) I knew there were times where I’d get busy — I traveled to San Diego the first week of December — and also I decided on this project relatively late, so I had a fire beneath me to get ahead.
That proved useful. There were a few posts that needed rearranging, and a few that had huge parts rewritten after I had finished several future posts, because some of the details I learned later on made it clear I misunderstood some fundamental information. The most notable example of this was the mess that is ERA+. Being several days ahead allowed me to go back and fix things without worry.
Looking back, I believe I did a fair job keeping the intended audience in mind. These were not meant for someone who already knew a fair bit and wanted more detail; I want these to exist as an introduction, something I can point to if I do any more in-depth posts in the future. I also wanted to avoid copying any of the excellent work already done by other communities in this field, particularly the fine folks at FanGraphs who taught me quite a lot this month. So, I did my best to add any context or explanation I found missing, otherwise I linked to their posts if I had nothing novel to contribute. Particularly for advanced statistics, I’m writing to bring people up to speed with how they are used in general, rather than the nuts and bolts of how they are calculated.
I’m of two minds about the success of this endeavor. While I’m pleased that it went off mostly without a hitch, part of me thinks that a main takeaway is that there’s very little else that has over three weeks of daily content that is engaging, and to which I have something unique to contribute. In particular, were I to do this next year I would have to find a topic early, and begin exploring what the 24 days of posts will be. I already knew enough about baseball statistics to mostly plan out everything on day 1, with only a few changes as I learned more or my interests adjusted.2Initially I had a stronger emphasis on Baseball Reference statistics, because of their Stathead tool; but, it’s way harder to find information on how they formulate statistics, so I started focusing on FanGraphs instead. If I chose some other topic with the goal of learning mostly from scratch, I risk writing summaries about something I have no deep knowledge of, which leads to boring and shallow content.
As such, I’ll keep next year’s Blogmas in mind, probing around for topics that interest me, and trying to pick something by the end of summer so I can get started early based on the work I feel I need to do. All that said, I’m happy about how this project went, and if it never happens again I’ll still be pleased it happened at all.
- 1I’ll be switching back to my weekly schedule on December 26.
- 2Initially I had a stronger emphasis on Baseball Reference statistics, because of their Stathead tool; but, it’s way harder to find information on how they formulate statistics, so I started focusing on FanGraphs instead.