"Finding Lost Runs and Wasted Outs"

Over the last year it's occurred to me that it was time to start writing again, but this time, unlike in grad. school, I'd write about things I really know about and care about. This blog is the start of a new project inspecting baseball; one of the greatest sports ever invented, and one that's great to argue about endlessly.

One thing we can take as a given form the outset is that baseball clubs intend to act rationally in their tactics and strategies. Another is that they often fail to do so. Aiding and abetting them are hordes of employees and old ball players that don't really know how to evaluate what is going on in the game that pays their bills.

One further observation ... the majority of fans crave genuinely to understand the game of baseball; a game that has accumulated more numbers around it than perhaps any other professional sport, and it has been doing so for over 100 years; yet well paid and polished professional commentators feed fans simplistic, outdated, and just plain wrong-headed "truths" about the game. And both of these groups tend to feed each other back and forth, leaving the fans wanting.

Anyway ... there are also intentions, perhaps commercial ones, to this endeavor in the real world. Tools of Ignorance Research and Statistics(TM) is dedicated to aiding clients in ... to coin a phrase ... "Finding Lost Runs and Wasted Outs"(c). A simple truth often disregarded ... runs are what win ball games, and outs are the currency that buys the runs. Twenty seven of them that are spent to get more runs than your opponent. Twenty seven runs that your pitchers and fielders try to extract from the opponent before they score more runs than you. Something to remember always when reading these posts ... this truth should never be far from your mind. It is always in the forefront in mine.

Thanks for joining me here ...


NEXT: All-Star voting has already begun on the MLB website.

Let's have a look, position by position, who's really got the goods this year, and who's probably going to make the starting line-up singing "The Way We Were".

'Til then,


James