As you may have guessed, this is a blog about baseball. Mostly baseball analytics, but also baseball books, history, and general baseball esoterica.
James Joyce once said of Ulysses, "I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book."
I'd say that's my goal for this blog when it comes to baseball.
Here is a brief list of my baseball credentials:
When I was 8 years old, I had a spiked mullet in an homage to my favorite player, Jose Canseco.
I started checking out the American League Red Book and the National League Green Book at my local library when I was 10.
When I was 14 years old, I won a competition sponsored by Upper Deck to see who could build the largest structure out of Upper Deck baseball cards. Each kid got paired with a former Major Leaguer. I lucked out and got paired with Bob Forsch who was ultra-competitive about the whole thing and together we built a 27-story card tower, winning me 6 boxes of 1998 Upper Deck baseball cards, which in 14-year-old-baseball-card-fan-adjusted-dollars was worth approximately $72 million.
In middle school, I wrote a short book evaluating the best player from each decade for a school project. From this point through my Master's degree, pretty much every "choose your own subject" school project was baseball-related.
I was a little league umpire for a few seasons in high school. I once had to call an 8-year-old out for leaving the field of play after peeing his pants. Sorry kid, rules are rules.
In high school baseball, a friend and I once tried to get practice cancelled by burying all of the team's baseballs in the long jump sand pit on the track. Surprisingly, this did not work.
When I was a senior in high school, I spent a good amount of AP Calculus class time writing a baseball simulation on my TI-83 calculator. I'm still pretty shaky on the chain rule for derivatives as a result.
I once gave a 10-minute presentation on how to keep score in a baseball game as part of a job interview at a tech company and somehow still got the job.
So you probably shouldn't trust much of what I say here. But hey, you're already here, so you might as well go ahead and look around.