February 25, 2014

BP Announcements

Another Analyst Gets the Call

by Max Marchi

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You should be accustomed to this by now. Words similar to the ones I’m about to write have been published on these pages by Colin Wyers. And Mike Fast. And Dan Fox. And others, all the way back to Keith Woolner. And elsewhere, readers (myself included) have had to adjust to living without the analysis of Josh Kalk, Joe P. Sheehan, and Sky Andrecheck, to name a few.

I won’t be writing for Baseball Prospectus anymore (and given the late volume of my output, you might not notice a big difference), because I have joined the analytics department of an MLB club.

(Note: Those of you who are interested in a final dose of my work can find more than 350 pages of it co-written with Jim Albert in our new book, Analyzing Baseball Data with R.)

Some of you might not know this, but my first sabermetric studies were written on an Italian blog more than 10 years ago. To this day I don’t know how Harry Pavlidis managed to find that blog and read its contents.

It wasn’t until after my first trip to San Francisco for the 1st Annual PITCHf/x Summit that I started writing in English. Alan M. Nathan was the one who encouraged me to make the switch—and he was still congratulating himself for that a few months ago when we were strolling together around Florence. So, this is for you guys who’ve edited my articles at The Hardball Times and Baseball Prospectus: Now you know who’s to blame for your extra work on the Italian guy’s writing!

Above I mentioned people (and a couple of websites made by several terrific people) that were instrumental in helping me reach this goal. Others in that number include the people who read, commented on, and criticized my articles; the organizations that collect and freely disseminate the data that I built my work upon; and the people who develop and maintain the software (and its additional packages) that I use to torture the above data until they confess. And finally, friends and lovers to whom I owe my prevalent positive mood. Thanks to you all.

And thanks to the Cleveland Indians for bringing me on board: I plan to reward their faith in my skills by helping them build a World Championship team.