Baseball Think Factory

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Baseball Think Factory, abbreviated as BTF or BBTF, was a sabermetrically-oriented baseball web site which featured daily news stories in baseball, with original content contributed by SABR members such as Dan Szymborski. The site was previously branded as Baseball Primer, and was created in 2001 by the founders of Baseball-Reference. Contributors who have gone on to work for Major League Baseball front offices include Voros McCracken, [1] Carlos Gomez, [2] and Tom Tango. Bill James' Baseball Abstract books published in the 1980s are widely considered to be the modern predecessor to websites using sabermetrics such as baseballthinkfactory and baseballprospectus. [3]

Contents

Baseball Think Factory shut down on December 15, 2023. A site for “refugees” of BBTF was established at https://hallofmerit.boards.net/

History

The site was founded in 2001 by Jim Furtado and Sean Forman of Baseball-Reference under the name "Baseball Primer," with a matching URL of (http://www.baseballprimer.com/). It lasted until Furtado shut it down December 15, 2023.

The site's emphasis on sabermetric baseball analysis attracted members of the rec.sport.baseball Usenet groups, and later drew readers of Rob Neyer's ESPN columns. The early site cultivated spirited discussions as a result of the Usenet veterans' familiarity with each other and the fact that registration was not required to post comments. The site also featured a number of original research articles.

In 2004, the site was re-branded as "Baseball Think Factory" and was re-built on a different software platform in order to support the growing user population and accommodate user registration and content management features.

BTF mainly hosted baseball discussions. Sports Illustrated magazine listed the site as an "essential baseball destination," characterizing it as offering "links to significant baseball articles, accompanied by freewheeling, usually informed discussion threads." [4] Michael Lewis also mentioned the site (as baseballprimer) in his book Moneyball. [5] [6]

Site sections

The site featured a number of sections with content for different audiences. These include:

Original research

BTF has featured numerous original research articles, primarily under the aforementioned sub-sites "Transaction Oracle," "Dialed In," and "Primate Studies." Several analysts such as Mitchel Lichtman and Tom Tango regularly posted original research articles and participated on discussion and criticism of the work at BTF before going on to establish their own sites and to publish results in book form. [10]

Given that statistics characterizing major league offense (batting) are fairly well established, much of the research posted on BTF spotlight defense (fielding) in the form of statistics more accurate than traditional fielding statistics. Examples include:

Mitchel Litchman's articles on ultimate zone rating

Litchman created fielding metrics that use play-by-play records that record the location of individual batted balls. Litchman combines this play-by-play data with his linear-weights system that assigns run values to the various baseball plays and their context within the game (inning, runners on base, score, etc.) Some of his initial articles on the system were posted on BTF. [11] [12]

Lichtman's Ultimate zone ratings (UZR) statistics can now be found on the baseball website Fangraphs.

ZiPS

Szymborski posts updates from his forecasting system known as "ZiPS" under his sub-site Transaction Oracle. [13] ZiPS results are also used in his articles evaluating Major League Baseball transactions. These projections can also be found on Fangraphs, updated for in-season projections.

Chris Dial's Dialed In columns

Dial is a SABR member who contributes articles to BTF, many focusing on statistics measuring defense. Dial has studied STATS, Inc.'s "zone rating" for years and posts updated statistics based on this data and on Retrosheet data. Some of Dial's more notable articles include:

Carlos Gomez's Bullpen Mechanics

Gomez is a former college and professional pitcher [17] who contributed articles featuring detailed, frame-by-frame analyses of pitcher mechanics. Prior to their publication, the average fan had little access to detailed evaluations of pitchers' mechanics and had to rely on short descriptions gleaned by beat reporters from scouting reports. The Arizona Diamondbacks organization offered him a position as a scout in 2007. [2]

Related Research Articles

Baseball statistics refers to a variety of metrics used to evaluate player and team performance in the game of baseball.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sabermetrics</span> Analysis of baseball statistics

In sports analytics, sabermetrics is the empirical analysis of baseball, especially baseball statistics that measure in-game activity. Sabermetricians collect and summarize the relevant data from this in-game activity to answer specific questions. The term is derived from the acronym SABR, which stands for the Society for American Baseball Research, founded in 1971. The term "sabermetrics" was coined by Bill James, who is one of its pioneers and is often considered its most prominent advocate and public face.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bill James</span> American baseball writer and statistician

George William James is an American baseball writer, historian, and statistician whose work has been widely influential. Since 1977, James has written more than two dozen books about baseball history and statistics. His approach, which he named sabermetrics after the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), scientifically analyzes and studies baseball, often through the use of statistical data, in an attempt to determine why teams win and lose.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Society for American Baseball Research</span> American baseball research organization

The Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) is a membership organization dedicated to fostering the research and dissemination of the history and record of baseball, primarily through the use of statistics. The organization was founded in Cooperstown, New York, on August 10, 1971, at a meeting of 16 “statistorians” coordinated by sportswriter Bob Davids. The organization now reports a membership of over 7,500 and is based in Phoenix, Arizona.

<i>Moneyball</i> 2003 book by Michael Lewis

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game is a book by Michael Lewis, published in 2003, about the Oakland Athletics baseball team and its general manager Billy Beane. It describes the team's sabermetric approach to assembling a competitive baseball team on a small budget. It led to the 2011 film Moneyball, starring Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill.

In baseball, fielding independent pitching (FIP) is intended to measure a pitcher's effectiveness based only on statistics that do not involve fielders. These include home runs allowed, strikeouts, hit batters, walks, and, more recently, fly ball percentage, ground ball percentage, and line drive percentage. By focusing on these statistics and ignoring what happens once a ball is put in play, which – on most plays – the pitcher has little control over, DIPS claims to offer a clearer picture of the pitcher's true ability.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Baseball Prospectus</span> Baseball analytics media company

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Sean Lahman is an author and journalist. He is currently a reporter for the USA Today Network and Rochester Democrat and Chronicle and frequently makes public appearances to speak about database journalism, data mining and open-source databases.

Tom Tango and "TangoTiger" are aliases used online by a baseball sabermetrics and ice hockey statistics analyst. He runs the Tango on Baseball sabermetrics website and is also a contributor to ESPN's baseball blog TMI . Tango is currently the Senior Database Architect of Stats for MLB Advanced Media.

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<i>The Neyer/James Guide to Pitchers</i> 2004 book by Rob Neyer and Bill James

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Ultimate zone rating (UZR) is a sabermetric statistic used to measure fielding. It compares the event that actually happened (hit/out/error) to data on similarly hit balls in the past to determine how much better or worse the fielder did than the "average" player. UZR divides a baseball field into multiple zones and assigns individual fielders responsibility for those zones.

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References

  1. ↑ Edes, Gordon (2004-07-18). "Figure on a compromise". The Boston Globe . Retrieved 2009-03-26.
  2. 1 2 Piecoro, Nick (2007-11-09). "New scout more than just a wannabe". The Arizona Republic . Retrieved 2009-03-26.
  3. ↑ Michael Lewis, Moneyball p. 235, Norton Press, 2004.
  4. ↑ Habib, Daniel G. (2004-09-27). "Great Site Lines". Sports Illustrated. Archived from the original on 2008-10-12. Retrieved 2009-03-26.
  5. ↑ Lewis, Michael (17 March 2004). Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game . W. W. Norton & Company. pp.  235, 292. ISBN   978-0-393-32481-5.
  6. ↑ Lewis, Michael (2004-03-01). "Out of Their Tree". Sports Illustrated. Archived from the original on 2008-06-14. Retrieved 2009-03-26.
  7. ↑ Murphy, John (2005-08-28). "Welcome to the Baseball Hall of Merit!". Baseball Think Factory. Retrieved 2009-03-26.
  8. ↑ HoM members elected thus far
  9. ↑ HoM Constitution
  10. ↑ Tango, Tom M.; Lichtman, Michel; Dolphin, Andrew; Palmer, Pete (2007). The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball. Potomac Books. ISBN   978-1-59797-129-4.
  11. ↑ Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR), Part 1, 2003/03/14
  12. ↑ Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR), Part 2, 2003/03/21
  13. ↑ Transaction Oracle
  14. ↑ Final 2008 Offense Plus Defense (OPD) Results, 2008/10/20.
  15. ↑ Defensive Analysis – Continuous Improvement, 2007/12/30.
  16. ↑ Dr. StrangeGlove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Zone Rating, 2005/11/10.
  17. ↑ "Carlos Gomez". The Baseball Cube. Archived from the original on 2008-06-09. Retrieved 2009-03-25.
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