1) It started with the High Heat video games for the PC – I bought it, but my computer wasn’t powerful enough to actually play the games, so I ended up just simming season after season. That was the first place I had ever heard of OPS (this was back around 1999/2000), and I fairly quickly realized that the best players in the game were the ones with the highest OPS’s. Then a few years later I got into OOTP Baseball, which had a way more advanced statistics engine, and introduced me to VORP. I also read a lot of Rob Neyer on ESPN, and would check BB-Reference just about every other day. Finally, last September I discovered this site (after having been a regular at the Giants SBN site for over a year), and over the past season I’ve probably tripled my knowledge about statistical analysis of baseball. Probably would have quadrupled if the Mets hadn’t sucked so bad and I completely lost interest during August, but them’s the breaks.

2) This was actually what inspired me to make this post, b/c I’ve been reading and commenting on an argument over who is better: Reggie Wayne or Andre Johnson at the Texans SBN blog, and they’ve had a bit of a stats vs. “watching the games” argument. I think my big post over there sums up my feelings, but I’ll repost a part of it so you know where I’m coming from:

"Football stats are a very, very different beast from baseball stats. Football isn’t a glorified one-on-one sport the way baseball is – the actions of all 22 men on the field affect the outcome of every play, and until they figure out a way to account for how much an all-pro left tackle impacts a wide receivers numbers vs. a scrub left tackle (for just one example), they’ll have to be taken with a grain of salt.

That said, just because they aren’t 100% accurate doesn’t mean we should throw the baby out with the bathwater. They are the most objective measure we have, and they are a useful tool. For everyone who says stat people "don’t watch the games" – I’m wondering, do you watch every single play of every single football game every week? And do you know how to objectively tell how much of a difference it makes to play against the Broncos defense vs. the Rams defense?"

I feel mostly the same about basketball and hockey. I also want to point out that I’m not suggesting that stats people don’t watch the games, just that’s how they are characterized by those who aren’t into stats.

My friend who has been on the Rockies Purple Row blog for a while now suggested I check out the Mets variant (here at Amazin ave). Once I came to this site i saw more acronyms I was unfamiliar with than i ever thought existed. So I started working my way through them, trying to understand what all these stats were and their uses. I began to find I could argue my baseball perspective much better as i understood these stats more and more, and from there it just picked up steam. Since I was already familar with statistical analysis from my scientific background, I picked up the value, and the limitations of these stats pretty quickly, now I cant even remember a time where I didn’t question a pitchers value based on FIP, or cite that while a player had a seemingly breakout season he had an inflated BABIP, and so on.

As for other sports, I watch football, but I don’t find myself applying advanced stats to it. There are just too many factors to take into account on any given play to really use non-counting stats to analyze a single player. I think advanced stats on a team level are probably possible, but might be tricky to calculate.

1) When I first got into baseball, I read Moneyball. That made me aware that advanced statistics existed, and so I kept my eyes open for it as my passion for baseball grew. Over time, I learned about websites like Fire Joe Morgan, Baseball Reference, Amazin’ Avenue, Fangraphs, and Rob Neyer’s ESPN blog, and that’s where I learned the most about advanced statistics.

2) The only other sport I watch on a regular basis is football, but I’ve never really been motivated to seek out advanced statistics. Not really sure why. I guess I feel a player’s value is much easier to determine from his on-the-field play in football than it is in baseball. Maybe because football places much more value on judging players on “the big moment,” whereas in baseball, the large number of games and the natural tendency of hitters to fail at getting on base (even the best hitters fail about 60% of the time) obscures how well a baseball player is performing over long periods of time.

While I understand the need for advanced statistics, I don’t think it is the be all and end all you guys make it out to be ( you bunch of coke bottle glasses, pocket protector wearing nerds ), I will say though, that most folks here are for the same reason and that is to make your Met Fan voice heard. I will also say the level and quality of sarcasm in this site is top notch.

Too bad that :

a) we don’t run the team

b) in the absence of (a), Jeff and Omar don’t take some of the stuff from here and apply it to reality.

As for other sports, football and sometimes hockey, but don’t really care who does what as far as numbers. Mostly, it is just an excuse to drink.

And came across Amazin Avenue through this posted by Tango Tiger, and I’m glad I did. I had been reading Metsmerized before I realized that they were headstrong, dumb, and called me a pocket protector nerd.
Another sport (actually 2) that I’m interested in applying statistical analysis is cricket, and soccer, which I find a little hard because most websites only give passing percentage data, which is quite useful however.

I somehow found Fangraphs in like June, which got me into advanced stats. Once I found them I was hooked. I’ve basically been reading sabermetrics stuff non-stop since then. I read Moneyball when I was a young kid, but I knew there was much more truth in that then the garbage I was hearing mostly. Then one day I was reading Metsblog and I saw something like" Amazin Avenue takes a look at hitters using lots of advanced statistics" as a link and now I’m here.
I am also a fan of football and kind of a fan of basketball, and so far haven’t used many advanced stats. I would like to read about them and see what their sabermetrics are all about. I don’t think they can be as good as baseball yet because of the whole team aspect, but I suspect the numbers will reveal much more truth than just watching or using basic stats. I started reading about football sabermetrics, but I just don’t have the time.

1) I came across Rob Neyer sometime in high school. I think OPS was the first “advanced” stat I discovered that I hadn’t previously heard of. Somehow I found Baseball Prospectus and read their stuff too, and of course Moneyball. Then I went to college and took a few years off from sabery baseball reading to drink beer and play intramural sports. After graduation I got back into it, read The Book, Fangraphs rose in influence, and other sites like Beyond the Boxscore and Statistically Speaking were putting out great stuff.

2) I like football, college basketball and hockey but don’t follow them from a statistical point of view like I do baseball. I probably will get into it in the future but right now I don’t have the time or a really strong inclination to do so.

Also, good thread.

1) like most people i read neyer and moneyball and just sort of got into it. honestly i dont understand how baseball fans can get into it without geeking out at stats. i mean, dont they get bored listening to the lame recycled platitudes players and coaches are constantly quoting after games? dont you want to know whats REALLY going on? arent you bored shitless reading AP reports and the “old school” MSM tripe? i mean, whatever, if its not your thing its not your thing, i guess.

2) i follow the NFL and am as big a giants fan as i am a mets fan. i get a little into the Football Outsiders stats but its tough to find good research on football. and i dont think its for lack of effort, just bad data. not enough games and not enough isolated events per games. i’ll watch college football but i dont really have a team. i follow the devils when they are good and pretty much dont care at all about any kind of basketball. i pretty much hate college basketball except for the tournament, because then i can gamble on it. also gambling on football is awesome.

I’d always flirted back and forth with an intense love of the game. In 2006, I was 21, and the Mets were relevant for the first time in half a decade, and for the first time since I fully understood the power of google and the interwebz. I got really into discussing baseball in online forums, but felt the level of discourse was sub-par on basic message boards and the comments sections of most blogs. I found that most of the interesting discussion and commentary was going on in the more statistically natured sources, among others (such as minor league analysis, which seemed like a more dedicated and accessible way of learning the rhetoric of scouting). So things like THT and BPro became required reading material. It never felt like I was converting to sabermetrics or anything like that, it was just an instructive and insightful way of discussing a very interesting game, and a natural progression for trying to better understand it.

2) Honestly, I don’t follow many other sports anymore. I watch football, and often wonder about how statistically sound/advanced the analysis of football is, but I just don’t have the same connection to football that I do baseball. When I was much younger I was very into basketball, but I didn’t go to a High School where it was taken very seriously, and after I stopped playing, and the Knicks got crappier and crappier, I stopped caring. One game that I did follow closely for a while on television, and probably got into the statistical aspects of even before I did with baseball was Poker. Its not nearly as interesting to watch now as it was a few years ago, but I’m not sure if its possible to watch or play poker with a serious analytical eye and not least consider statistical analysis, even if its more an abstraction into thinking about outcomes and how they effect decisions than putting discrete numbers on probabilities, its still essentially the same process.

I’ve always been something of a numbers geek, but I’m terrible at advanced math. I was the kind of nerd who kept his own stats in Ken Griffey Jr. Baseball, almost obsessively. When I read Moneyball, I remember being pretty impressed by it; also I think it was the first time I’d heard of OPS. About 3 years ago I started reading THT (don’t remember how, and I haven’t been to the site for some time), and I think that’s how I found AA.

I do follow other sports, but I put less than baseball, and with less emphasis on stats. I haven’t been to a basketball game since high school. I’m a die-hard Jets/Devils fan, but I take a more traditional approach to them. Mostly I just watch the games.

about most of the advanced statistical analysis that is used regularly here. But, this is a more intelligent Mets blog than others out there because of it, I can tell you that much.

Back when you actually had to type espn.starwave.com to get to their website, Neyer was just about the only columnist whose work was constantly available online without a newsgroup subscription. In 1997, I really started getting into the Mets, and my family were early internet adopters, so the two things mixed, and I read about crazy things, like “players decline after 30”, and “RBIs don’t equal skill”, and the wackiest thing of all, “Pitcher ERA is better than wins as a stat”. I found BP in its heyday, and, finally, started looking at the games I was watching, only to find that the stats did tend to make more sense of the game than the other approaches.

As for other sports, I like football, but what other people have said is pretty spot-on: they’re ages behind where baseball research is because they’ve got a more complex set of problems with player interdependence going on. Still, Football Outsiders, among others, is great for trying to sift away some things that we know don’t work- like using total yards allowed to evaluate defenses. If nothing else, it makes you think about the game on a second level, which I like doing.

It made me realize the inefficiencies of traditional stats.

I watch the NFL and College Football and I follow and coach hockey. I haven’t gotten into advanced statistics with them mostly because I haven’t come across a whole lot of info on them. I also tend to think that given the interdependent nature of the sports, the statistics aren’t as valuable in assessing individual performance. I have however begun to look at the traditional stats in these sports more skeptically based on my understanding of the flaws of any data set.

1) Really, Fire Joe Morgan was what did it for me. It basically confirmed my growing suspicion that most people writing and talking about baseball for a living were idiots and got me interested in the stats they used to prove that point. Found MetsGeek through metsblog I believe and wandered over here off a post from metsblog as well, so at least Cerrone links to intelligent baseball forums sometimes. Really started getting more into SABR stuff this summer too through AA, Fangraphs, BtB, etc.

2) I’m a Mets, Jets, U of Michigan Football, and Georgetown Basketball fan in that order. Don’t really get to statty with the other ones beyond the obvious ones like Jets dissapointment % and % of times the Hoyas will get outrebounded by a team over which they have a height advantage (these are high numbers).

I’m not a big NBA fan, but I’d recommend this Michael Lewis article about the secret SABR-esque stuff going on with some NBA teams:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/magazine/15Battier-t.html

I read my first Bill James Baseball Abstract in 1984 (‘83 season recap), and after I got over why he kept saying how much we sucked (we did) but had a chance to turn it around quickly (we did that too), I started getting into it. Sabermetrics in those days was the equivalent of using punch cards in computers (which was fair, since I was only a couple of years out of college and was using them in my Comp Sci classes). The idea of run support for a starting pitcher was still revolutionary back then. Although I don’t research myself, the whole concept just opened my eyes to a whole new side of the game that I couldn’t see as a kid. I found AA through Yahoo. You’re not going see me doing some of nice analysis because I don’t have time for it (and also why I’m frequently late to the party with my posts), I still enjoy the site. Which brings to me something I wanted to say in another post. Now that the season is over, I want to publicly thank Eric, James, Sam, Joe and Alex for the blog and for the guys who regularly posted for helping to get us through the year.

I can’t remember how I found FJM, but I remember reading a post and just laughing and agreeing (even though I didn’t know what WAR or VORP or even OPS was). I realized how stupid a stat RsBI was and then read Moneyball. I stumbled upon this from Metsblog (they mentioned it on SNY and I checked it out)and I realized this was an awesome community. My first post involved saves and not knowing what WAR was, so that was regrettable, but James K steered me in the right way.