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!)

My first two articles in this series are already planned and I have high hopes that they will be well received.  One will be titled something like “Why Roy Halladay Shits on Johan Santana’s Face aka How to Use FIP/xFIP/tERA to Make Mets Fans Cry”.  Nothing like using recent trash talk to teach stats right?  The other will be about Philadelphia’s favorite son with the title, “Chase Utley, You Are the Man.”  I’m aware that dozens of entries at other blogs already have that title, but seriously, that phrase brings more goosebumps than the 2007 Phillies “Goosebumps” ad campaign (or the entire R.L. Stine series for that matter).

I wasn't fooled...

All this talk of stats may have some of you reflexively cringing.  You may be wondering, “but what about clutch? what about the intangibles?”  Fear not!  Despite the well publicized (and highly exaggerated) discord between the statheads and scouts, no saberist worth his salt will tell you that any of their beautiful numbers is perfect or that scouting isn’t as much or more important than statistics.  For both real decision makers and us internet baseball junkies/trolls, context neutral statistics serve several meaningful purposes.  Here are just some of those:

• They give decision makers a tool to quantify an approximate dollar value for a player
• They serve as a useful semi-objective means to double-check the subjective work of scouts
• When scouts and stats agree, decision makers can be very confident in the assessment
• When they disagree, decision makers can focus their resources to figure out why, stats could pick up on something the scouts failed to see and vice versa
• Stats can help identify inefficiencies in the game, see A’s and OBP circa 2003 or defense and Rays (2008), Mariners (2009), Rangers (2009), Red Sox/rest of the decent GM’s (2010)
• Stats allow fans to evaluate players with minimal actual scouting
• Stats help us to identify which fantasy performers are likely to breakout/collapse, see my trade of Emilio Bonifacio for Mark Buehrle and Nate McLouth last year after week 1
• Stats let us write articles that definitively say that Roy Halladay is better than Johan Santana
• Stats help us make Mets fans cry
• Stats hate Jeff Francouer

nice catch clown...

Let me repeat my exclamation to Fear not!  My articles will not be totally stats reliant.  In the absence of scouting reports (and personal scouting) I will rely heavily on statistics, but I will also seek out that scouting data and use it whenever possible.  I like scouting data more than stats data.  Unfortunately, it’s rather costly to get personal scouting data on everyone I’m going to talk about in this blog.  I watch a lot of baseball, but I’m only one man and I have a job, girlfriend, and video game addiction to maintain on top of the time spent writing, watching, and reading baseball.  It’s not like I’m a family man, blood spatter expert, and serial killer of serial killers like Dexter, but my plate’s not empty either.  I will also occasionally call people douchebags.

If anyone is up for some homework, I highly recommend fangraphs.com as a starting point to self-learning advanced stats.  If you ever have any questions, please post away in the comments or you can email me at pitchin432ATyahooDOTcom.  Until next time, I’ll leave you with the latest shenanigans from Jim Bowden.  Be sure to see the last 10 seconds.  http://www.insidethebook.com/ee/index.php/site/article/jim_bowdens_sabermetrics_primer/