First Post

Welcome to SaberNerd! As the name of this blog suggests, I am a fan of the type of baseball analysis called sabermetrics, but that is not the only thing this blog is going to focus on. While it will be stat-heavy, I will also focus on interesting historical aspects of baseball. One of the first such topics I plan to address is the evolution of the pitcher's mound. While most fans know about the mound being lowered prior to the 1969 season, many may not know that pitchers originally threw from flat ground and as late as the early 20th century there was no specification for mound height. However, in this post I want to introduce myself, explain my motivation for this blog, and describe a bit more about what you can expect in the coming posts.

I grew up in a Cardinals household, as did my dad (a result of the wide reach of KMOX). Based on this and when I was born, Ozzie Smith was my childhood hero. While the level of my attention to the team has vacillated throughout my life, St. Louis will always be my team. Perhaps prophetically, I also had a loose interest in the Twins due to Kirby Puckett and later Torii Hunter (from my home state of Arkansas) and rooted for them when they weren't playing the Cards. As of March 2010 I became a resident of Hopkins, MN (a suburb of the Twin Cities) and my first weekend here I saw an exhibition game between the Cardinals and Twins in the newly opened Target Field (I was wearing a Pujols jersey).

Another of my interests that has sustained itself since childhood is computers. In 2005 I graduated from the University of Tulsa with a degree in computer science. In the process I had developed a strong interest in artificial intelligence and the following fall I entered the AI masters program at the University of Georgia. By the next summer it was time for me to come up with a thesis proposal and was stumped. Having recently read Moneyball, I had a moment of inspiration. The result was a thesis comparing various machine learning techniques to predict player season totals for a handful of stats. I compared my results with the output of 3 publicly available projection systems. While I didn't beat the gold standard (Baseball Prospectus), I made an admirable showing.

After graduation I got a real job and my projection software gathered dust. I would get a new idea once in a while, code up something, get mediocre results, and not spend the time to improve them. Then a couple months ago I finally got around to reading Watching Baseball Smarter. It was an overall bad book with an interesting fact sprinkled here and there, but it piqued my interest enough to tackle Koppett's Concise History of Major League Baseball (still a work in process), which I had picked up on a whim at a library book sale a few months earlier. I also decided to watch Ken Burn's Baseball in conjunction. Additionally, somewhere in the middle of all that I became the last baseball fan to discover the great site Fangraphs.

Immersed in the history of my favorite sport and inspired by Fangraphs, I got the idea for this blog. I dug out Baseball Hacks, which I bought back in my thesis days, and built a respectable stats database (the subject of my next post). Early on this blog is going to focus on me exploring that new database. I'll provide detailed information on building the database, information on the tables and their contents, and interesting queries I build. I will also provide tidbits from my reading. As I get more comfortable with the database I plan to write a series of Sabermetrics 101 posts and ultimately tackle questions like "How many bases would Rickey Henderson have stolen if he started his career in 1935?". As I mentioned before, I will also be writing historical essays that don't directly relate to statistics. Lastly I will be reviving my projection software and will provide results prior to the next season.

I've laid out a pretty arduous plan for this blog, but I'm excited for the challenge. My hope is that my excitement for my topics will come across in the posts I write and that I will be able to develop an audience of like-minded individuals. Enjoy!