My Substack currently has two features, the first of which is Notes, the second longer articles. Both the Notes and the articles are longer than what is normally meant by those terms, you will notice.
The Notes are available on this page, but are also sent out together every Sunday. This is something I fell into doing after I started the Substack. They are any and every of the following.
A recording of my tracking of baseball, particularly the current season.
A baseball statistical diary.
A compendium of Jayson Stark or Tim Kurkjian-like stats.
Tweets, but at a scope that is comfortable for me, unrestrained by a character limit. They have the same “fired off” quality as tweets and serve the same emotional need. I remember a study hall teacher who would signal out the newly pubescent for “voices that would not whisper.” Well, my writing voice cannot be truncated, so X was not an option for me.
Mini studies. At first, I really struggled to differentiate between my real research studies and these. I would agonize whether I should do something as a post or a Note. What I was sure was just a Note could turn out to be 5,000-word study. I have eventually figured out that anything I don’t do spur of the moment belongs as a research study. If there are stages to it, and I have 24 hours to think about it, it will simply be too extensive to be a Note. But there is stuff that doesn’t meet that barometer, and that’s what goes here.
Snapshots.
You will find that the Notes are self-referential. Saying that self-referential isn’t bad is like saying the Big Five personality traits are by default neutral even when two are High Neuroticism and Low Conscientiousness. “Self-referential” is bad, and more often than ‘e’ comes after ‘i’. But I think the Notes pick up steam because they build on what I’ve done before. This means that I have more and more to write about over time. After a while, you, too, as a reader will benefit from the thread-like aspect.
Aside from the self-referential aspect, which does inevitably mean that I cover some things more than others, you will notice that I talk about all players and all teams. If you know what’s coming next, you know more than I do.
O.k., Part II. And in my opinion, the much more important part. Research studies. At-length treatments. What have you.
I’m 48 years old now. Between the ages of 9 and 18, I did do other things other than live in The Baseball Encyclopedia, but it’s fair to say I was exceptionally unbalanced. Life’s loss was baseball’s gain, however. I never asked myself what the point was, or what I was doing. If you ever tried to do so much, you’d be too discouraged to ever start down that path. It was only possible to spend so much time on it because I did it with exceptional avidity, and that meant I was doing even more than the time invested suggested.
But again, as far as exactly what I was doing, I am at something of a loss to tell you there, and there were not formal end products that were recognized by other people. Don’t get me wrong, I was completely clear on what my projects were, and I filled up notebook after notebook. I would sometimes write little analyses at the end. But I certainly didn’t have any idea that I was shooting for certain publications, and there weren’t the opportunities for that in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, anyway. If it wasn’t before the internet, I had at least never heard of the internet.
Right before I went to college, I gave up my habit, or you could even call it, my lifestyle. I dared to stop. It was dumb, although it is true that I had become self-conscious about my lifestyle. I had always been ashamed, but now I was self-conscious about being ashamed. I felt as I did because I was Doing Baseball, as Bill James detailed in his 1986 Abstract article about the Royals (which I certainly had in mind when I became a statistic, having read his discussion of the phenomenon when that Abstract came out), and everyone knew baseball was stupid, baseball was for kids, baseball didn’t make a difference in the world.
It was also somewhat generic. I had always been unusually knowledgeable about Thoroughbred racing, too, so I leaned into that. That felt more individual, stamped me more. Made for an image so strange people respected it, or at least I lied to myself they did. Much of my realignment was about how I appeared to other people, specifically my new friends. But once I had made the change, it took over, even though I felt somewhat lost and empty, and suddenly I never considered restarting what had been my obsession, never woke up with the same raison d’etre.
After I graduated from college, I made a pointed effort to get into baseball again, but to my great surprise, I found that I was behind, and had a great deal of difficulty gaining encyclopedic knowledge of the current players as I had had before. Now it mattered that I didn’t know how exactly I had done what I did before, and I found I couldn’t just do it again. I felt I should be able to know as much as I had known before without working as hard. (Of course, I had never looked at it as work then.)
A wonderful thing in college was that I acquired a whole new skillset. My love for statistics manifested in Psychology, in thinking about the research psychologists did as well as their data analysis. It was an intellectual foundation that now frames, disciplines, and complements the intuitive understanding of data I gained from my childhood spent playing with baseball data.
With these two footholds, I have found my groove, and it turned out the ability to explore and to be creative had in fact never left. It just needed to be revived.
What is particularly exciting, of course, is the tools that we have today, so that I can learn so much faster. In my youth, I did everything by hand. We have more breadth of information, and that is extremely valuable, making the endless universe of baseball somehow even more endless. But if I could choose between our old amount of information and no Stathead, and our new detail of information that has reached its apotheosis as Statcast or just Stathead, I’d choose having Stathead.
I’m biased, of course, but I do think the framework of Psychology is the best for baseball research. It seems to me that the number of analysts in baseball with an economics background outnumber those with a Psychology background a thousand times, but I think the economics approach is not ideally suited to baseball research, and doesn’t tackle the problems head on as well. As someone trained in Psychology, I feel like I progress from the general to the specific back to the general better than economists. Psychologists optimize the scientific method in the non-physical sciences. Have the requisite doggedness.
If nothing else, my different perspective should be interesting. I admit the discrepancy is frustrating for me, however, because although I’m largely talking about the same things the economically oriented are, my vocabulary is different, so it’s harder for me to get in on the conversation. But I am looking for the best method for the best answers, not to sound like everyone else.
I also only give very occasional attention to research done on FanGraphs, Baseball Prospectus, etc. I should probably keep up with the work of these analysts a lot more. A few of them are really smart, and almost all have a laudable love of research.
Here, I will own the downside of my childhood imbalance. I am paranoid about remaining original. I certainly accomplish that in my research. I let it go wherever it does. I don’t judge it, and trust to my seriousness and interest in underlying issues to bring it around to meaningful places, even if it’s arcane on the surface.
You will probably note that when I am curious about someone else’s work or about measures other have created, which inevitably happens, I do do a deep dive and make sure I understand the subject and can use the measure appropriately. There, too, I am paranoid, here about mistaking a mistake, and it happens to be a healthy kind of paranoia.
Luckily, I pick stuff up fast, but I suspect my work would be far better if completely let my guard down and entered into what everyone else was doing (even if I did come out writing like a scout, with personal pronouns forsaken for indefinite ones).
A final thing that I think distinguishes my work. I have listened closely to what my idol, Bill James, says about statistics just being a means to an end, a tool for answering questions, and not intrinsically interesting, I understand the spirit of that. Bill can be interested in whatever he wants, but for me, I am interested in the meaning, in the research questions, but I am also interested in statistics, I have to say. Interested in logic and mathematical nuance, yes, but as applied strictly to baseball, I am also interested in exactly what statistics say, even if we don’t need particular ones to say who is better than whom, or even to augment our information. I am fascinated by the vast record of baseball, and like looking at how it all fits together. There is a great deal of material here, I think. This is pure intrinsic knowledge, but knowledge is beautiful, no matter the kind.
There ends my Jerry Maguire-like missive. Not sure how long it came out. Didn’t stay up all night doing it. It’s only 5:00 pm, but it’s a lot of writing for 105 minutes. Stuff I had to say, though, and that thereby suddenly isn’t embarrassing.
