Posts Tagged ‘Mr T’

Some of you may have already read my introduction the last time Long Drive briefly opened its doors to the public.  For those of you that didn’t, rejoice! for this version is about 53% more readable.  I’m The A Team, check out my theme song and trailer.

I’ve been brought aboard mostly for my familiarity with advanced statistics and scathing indictments of the Mets.  Being a first hand witness of Omar Minaya’s bungling of a second in-division foe has been a truly rewarding experience made all the richer by the play-by-play of The Contest.  But in all seriousness, my job isn’t to be resident Mets basher.  I think Chris can handle that just fine.

I’m here to talk stats, analyze trades, ruminate on the virtues of our various prospects, second guess management, and keep up with the latest hype.  I’m really mostly here to do that first thing.  When doing analysis at Long Drive, we’re going to be using a suite of stats that the casual fan will be unfamiliar with.  I will be trying my damnedest to explain why context adjusted statistics are more useful than the standard crap on the back of a baseball card without putting you to sleep.  Along this line of thought, I will be starting a roughly weekly “primer” series on helpful stats.  I put primer in quotes because these articles will be intentionally light on math and therefore not very primer-ish.  I do this for three reasons.  First, being a liberal arts grad, my own math chops aren’t really up to snuff when it comes to doing my own analysis.  I can import an excel document into Stata and run an ordinary least squares regression on it, and that’s about the extent of my ability.  I’m not even sure why someone would do that for baseball…  Second, I’m aware of my audience.  Chris’ claim to fame is calling people douchebags.  I can’t compete with that by discussing the various subtleties of different compilations of Wins Above Replacement.  Third and perhaps most important, all this shit has been done already by people with major sabermetric chops.  Why do a poor job re-writing someone else’s work when I can link to it, pop in a quote or two, and relate it back to something relevant to us Phillies fans.

(you should click that read more button!)
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