Posts Tagged ‘Greg Dobbs’

We’ve almost made it though the horror that is the off-season. As Phillies fans, we’ve been blessed with a productive winter: We’ve swapped Cy Young winners, resigned some of our biggest names while some of our dear friends moved away. Our boys got got hitched, dropped some pounds, and we have some new faces wearing red pinstripes for the first time. One thing that’s for sure that if you’re anything like me is that the whole ordeal was absolute torture. I spent the entire time mashing F5 on my keyboard refreshing my browser on all of my favorite blogs trying to devour any scrap of news related to Our Heroes as fast as possible.

One of many, many, many books I've never read.

But, unlike you, I’ve been keeping track of all that’s being said. I’ve spent countless hours this offseason combing through every Phillies blog seeing who’s being talked about and what’s being said. My electric bill has been sky high as the rack of specialized servers in my apartment combed through the internet picking out data pertaining to the each individual player on the team. I’ve hired a team of interns from my alma mater Shippensburg University to compile this data into complex databases that software engineers put together for me at a cost that is absolutely staggering. (Chris, thanks in advance for approving this expense report. Also, I didn’t graduate from Ship so much as I was kicked out but I don’t know a fancy Latin term for that so… GO RED RAIDERS!)

The result of all of this work is that I can empirically prove which member of the Philadelphia Phillies won the offseason, and the result may surprise you.

Before I post the results let me tell you about the process I (actually) used to gather the data. Google has refined their search engine to a point where it allows for some really specific results. I searched each member of the team by their name (in quotes) and Phillies to cut down on irregularities like results for Ryan Howard from The Office and an author by the name of Carlos Ruiz Zafón. That result was then narrowed down to results created between November 4^th and February 4^nd. Finally, those results were limited to only blog posts. Google then displayed the total number of results rounded to the nearest ten (Unless there were less than a hundred, when the exact total was reported.)

However, simply saying who got the most mentions wasn’t enough for me. They had to be weighted somehow. I needed to put a value to each mention, because not each mention is equal. Of course Roy Halladay is going to be talked about almost constantly… isn’t that part of the reason he got so much money? So I took the number of mentions for each player this off-season and their 2010 salary (big ups to Cot’s Baseball Contracts) and made myself some statistics: Read the rest of this entry »