Baseball Think Factory
Encyclopedia
Baseball Think Factory, abbreviated as BTF or BBTF, is a sabermetrically
-oriented baseball web site that features the day's prominent 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
. A number of contributors have gone on to work for Major League Baseball
front offices, including Voros McCracken
, Carlos Gomez, 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
.
under the name "Baseball Primer," with a matching URL of (http://www.baseballprimer.com/). 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 has become well-known for its baseball discussions. Sports Illustrated
listed the site as an "essential baseball destination," characterizing it as offering "links to significant baseball articles, accompanied by freewheeling, usually informed discussion threads." Michael Lewis
also mentioned the site (as baseballprimer) in his book Moneyball.
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.
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.
Some of the notable examples include:
Lichtman's Ultimate zone rating
s (UZR) statistics can now be found on the baseball website Fangraphs
.
, updated for in-season projections.
"zone rating" for years and posts updated statistics based on this data and on Retrosheet
data. Some of Dial's more notable articles include:
Gomez's efforts and innovative articles were rewarded when the Arizona Diamondbacks
organization offered him a position as a scout in 2007.
Sabermetrics
Sabermetrics is the specialized analysis of baseball through objective, empirical evidence, specifically baseball statistics that measure in-game activity. The term is derived from the acronym SABR, which stands for the Society for American Baseball Research...
-oriented baseball web site that features the day's prominent news stories in baseball, with original content contributed by SABR members such as Dan Szymborski
Dan Szymborski
Daniel John Szymborski is an American writer of sabermetrics primarily known for his work with baseball projections and minor league translations....
. The site was previously branded as Baseball Primer, and was created in 2001 by the founders of Baseball-Reference
Baseball-Reference
Baseball-Reference.com is a website providing statistics for every player in Major League Baseball history. The site is often used by major media organizations and baseball broadcasters as a source for statistics.-History:...
. A number of contributors have gone on to work for Major League Baseball
Major League Baseball
Major League Baseball is the highest level of professional baseball in the United States and Canada, consisting of teams that play in the National League and the American League...
front offices, including Voros McCracken
Voros McCracken
Robert "Vörös" McCracken is a prominent sabermetrician. Vörös is a nickname from his Hungarian heritage, meaning "red," specifically "blood red." He is most widely recognized for his pioneering work on Defense Independent Pitching Statistics .-DIPS published:McCracken first publicly disclosed his...
, Carlos Gomez, and Tom Tango
Tom Tango
Tom Tango and "TangoTiger" are aliases used online by a well-respected expert in baseball sabermetrics and ice hockey statistical analysis. He runs the Tango on Baseball sabermetrics website and is also a contributor to ESPN's baseball blog TMI .In 2006, Tango's book The Book: Playing the...
. Bill James
Bill James
George William “Bill” James is a baseball writer, historian, and statistician whose work has been widely influential. Since 1977, James has written more than two dozen books devoted to baseball history and statistics...
' Baseball Abstract books published in the 1980s are widely considered to be the modern predecessor to websites using sabermetrics such as baseballthinkfactory and baseballprospectus
Baseball Prospectus
Baseball Prospectus is an organization that publishes a website, BaseballProspectus.com, devoted to the sabermetric analysis of baseball. BP has a staff of regular columnists and provides advanced statistics as well player and team performance projections on the site...
.
History
The site was founded in 2001 by Jim Furtado and Sean Forman of Baseball-ReferenceBaseball-Reference
Baseball-Reference.com is a website providing statistics for every player in Major League Baseball history. The site is often used by major media organizations and baseball broadcasters as a source for statistics.-History:...
under the name "Baseball Primer," with a matching URL of (http://www.baseballprimer.com/). The site's emphasis on sabermetric baseball analysis attracted members of the rec.sport.baseball Usenet
Usenet
Usenet is a worldwide distributed Internet discussion system. It developed from the general purpose UUCP architecture of the same name.Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979 and it was established in 1980...
groups, and later drew readers of Rob Neyer's
Rob Neyer
Rob Neyer is a baseball author and writer for SB Nation. He started his career working for Bill James and STATS, and then joined ESPN.com as a columnist from 1996 to January 2011 before becoming SB Nation's National Baseball Editor...
ESPN
ESPN
Entertainment and Sports Programming Network, commonly known as ESPN, is an American global cable television network focusing on sports-related programming including live and pre-taped event telecasts, sports talk shows, and other original programming....
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 has become well-known for its baseball discussions. Sports Illustrated
Sports Illustrated
Sports Illustrated is an American sports media company owned by media conglomerate Time Warner. Its self titled magazine has over 3.5 million subscribers and is read by 23 million adults each week, including over 18 million men. It was the first magazine with circulation over one million to win the...
listed the site as an "essential baseball destination," characterizing it as offering "links to significant baseball articles, accompanied by freewheeling, usually informed discussion threads." Michael Lewis
Michael Lewis (author)
Michael Lewis is an American non-fiction author and financial journalist. His bestselling books include The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, Liar's Poker, The New New Thing, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game, Panic and Home Game: An...
also mentioned the site (as baseballprimer) in his book Moneyball.
Site sections
The site features a number of sections with content for different audiences. Some of the more notable ones are:- Baseball Newsstand – The newsstand is a newsblog where significant baseball-related articles are linked. Entries usually feature a provocative excerpt of the article along with a discussion thread. For many site members, this newsblog is the "main" part of the site.
- Hall of Merit (abbreviated as the HoM) – A sub-site conceived by Joe Dimino as an alternative to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in CooperstownNational Baseball Hall of Fame and MuseumThe National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum is an American history museum and hall of fame, located at 25 Main Street in Cooperstown, New York, operated by private interests serving as the central point for the study of the history of baseball in the United States and beyond, the display of...
. The purpose of the HoM is "to identify the best players in baseball history and thereby identify the omissions and errors that can be found in the other venerable institution." Given the focus of the main site, the discussions often appeal to sabermetric criteria, including in-depth understanding of the various historical eras of major league and negro league baseball as well as advanced statistics. Pages of note: HoM members elected thus far and HoM Constitution - Transaction Oracle – Dan SzymborskiDan SzymborskiDaniel John Szymborski is an American writer of sabermetrics primarily known for his work with baseball projections and minor league translations....
posts analyses of major league transactions (player signings and trades). Szymborski also publishes articles on his ZiPS forecasting system here. ZiPS is designed to forecast player statistics based on past performance and similarities to other major league players.
- Team Sites – The popularity of some teams has led to the creation of sub-sections of the newsblog that link to articles of interest to specific teams. There currently are four such team blogs: Sox Therapy (Boston Red Sox), Gonfalon Cubs (Chicago Cubs), Count the Rings (New York Yankees), and It's Mets...Just Mets (New York Mets)
- Game "Chatters" – Specific threads are devoted to regular season and postseason major league baseball games (as well as for special events such as the Olympics or the World Baseball Championship). Site members contribute to the group liveblog during these events.
- Dialed In and Primate Studies – These sub-sites feature original baseball research and merit a more in-depth discussion below.
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 TangoTom Tango
Tom Tango and "TangoTiger" are aliases used online by a well-respected expert in baseball sabermetrics and ice hockey statistical analysis. He runs the Tango on Baseball sabermetrics website and is also a contributor to ESPN's baseball blog TMI .In 2006, Tango's book The Book: Playing the...
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.
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.
Some of the notable examples include:
Mitchel Litchman's articles on UZR (ultimate zone rating)
Litchman has been one on the innovators in the creation of 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:- Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR), Part 1, 2003/03/14
- Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR), Part 2, 2003/03/21
Lichtman's Ultimate zone rating
Ultimate zone rating
Ultimate zone rating is a sabermetric statistic used to measure fielding. It compares the event that actually happened to data on similarly hit balls in the past to determine how much better or worse the fielder did than the "average" player...
s (UZR) statistics can now be found on the baseball website Fangraphs
Fangraphs
FanGraphs.com is a website run by Fangraphs Inc., located in Arlington, Virginia, and created and owned by David Appelman that provides statistics for every player in Major League Baseball history....
.
Dan Szymborski's forecasting system, ZiPS
Szymborski posts updates from his forecasting system known as "ZiPS" under his sub-site Transaction Oracle. ZiPS results are also used in his articles evaluating Major League Baseball transactions. These projections can also be found on FangraphsFangraphs
FanGraphs.com is a website run by Fangraphs Inc., located in Arlington, Virginia, and created and owned by David Appelman that provides statistics for every player in Major League Baseball history....
, 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.'sSTATS, Inc.
STATS LLC is a global sports statistics and information company – the company name originated as an acronym for "Sports Team Analysis and Tracking Systems". It was founded on April 30, 1981 by John Dewan, who became the company's CEO...
"zone rating" for years and posts updated statistics based on this data and on Retrosheet
Retrosheet
Retrosheet is a non-profit organization whose website features major league baseball box scores and play-by-play narratives for almost every contest from 1871–1872, 1874, 1911 NL, and 1918–2010...
data. Some of Dial's more notable articles include:
- Final 2008 Offense Plus Defense (OPD) Results, 2008/10/20. Dial provides OPD – a statistic estimating a player's overall contribution on offense and defense. Offensive values were generated using Extrapolated RunsExtrapolated RunsExtrapolated Runs is a baseball statistic invented by sabermetrician Jim Furtado to estimate the number of runs a hitter contributes to his team...
and defensive values are represented by Dial's DRS (defensive runs saved), which are based on ZR (zone rating) data. - Defensive Analysis – Continuous Improvement, 2007/12/30. A reflection on generating statistics based on retrosheet play-by-play fielding data, the relative impact of including line drive (LD) data.
- Dr. StrangeGlove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Zone Rating, 2005/11/10. Article on how to create a metric to measure a player's performance on defense, based on zone rating (ZR) data. Comparison to Mitchel Lichtman's UZR, which was taken to be the state-of-the-art fielding metric.
Carlos Gomez's Bullpen Mechanics
Gomez is a former college and professional pitcher who contributed articles featuring detailed, frame-by-frame analyses of pitcher mechanics. Gomez's analyses were notable in that 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.Gomez's efforts and innovative articles were rewarded when the Arizona Diamondbacks
Arizona Diamondbacks
The Arizona Diamondbacks are a professional baseball team based in Phoenix. They play in the West Division of Major League Baseball's National League. From 1998 to the present, they have played in Chase Field...
organization offered him a position as a scout in 2007.