A Saber-Slanted Baseball Community

Part of the initiation into saberdom (you know, where they taught us snark and the condescending attitude) is the requirement that you have to link to anything involving Bill James. Thus, this link. Oh, and a quote: "BCB: You mention wanting to get your information out to people. When you started, if there had been blogs around, would you have started blogging about it? Bill: Probably. And this is my dumb luck. In self-publishing, just before self publishing became practical, if I had done it five years later I would have been buried behind people who were better at it than I was, but the fact that I was doing it before other people were was very helpful to me. And all my career I’ve received undue rewards for being ahead of the curve on that issue and a couple of others. This is a true story: in 1976 Dick Cramer published an article in the Journal of the Society of American Baseball Research, wrote a very good analytical article that stands up well over time. In 1977 he sent them another article and the editor said he didn’t know if there was a market for an article of this type every year. So the entire de facto market for books about sabermetrics, articles about sabermetrics was only about two years. So, once there was a place to go with it, there were a lot of people waiting to go there." (Why does everything seem to tie in to a Malcolm Gladwell book?)

In a recent SI article, Joe Posnanski (in an exchange with Bill James) speculates that Texas Rangers President Nolan Ryan's opposition to pitch counts stems in part from his frustration over being put on a strict pitch count in 1987. Just how bad was Ryan's 1987?