A Little Light Reading

Just a few things to chew on...

Interesting article by Paul Swydan on the Rockies use of information technology. There is more in the Rockies magazine that they sell at the ballpark with some excellent photos of the custom software they use.

Interesting quotes from Tony LaRussa on scoring in multiple innings increasing the probability of winning. As Phil points out, however, simply scoring more runs also increases the probability of winning dramatically and so the quesiton is really which is the more fundamental thing to strive for - scoring in multiple innings or putting together an offense that can score more runs in the aggregate. It seems to me that the former is just an effect or outgrowth of the latter.

Here are seven reasons why sabermetrics helps build a better ballgame by Nate Silver.

An excellent and succint analysis of this April's weather and it's impact on run scoring. It's all about the temperature. I'll have more to say about this in my Baseball Prospectus column tomorrow with regards to pitch velocity.

In my last chat I said:

A couple weeks ago I overheard one beat writer mention repeatedly that so-and-so was a "four-A" player indicating that regardless of what he's doing in AAA (this guy has an OPS of 1.25 thus far and a pretty good track record) he'll never make it in the majors. One of the things that performance analysis has revealed is that for the most part there is no magical line between the minors and majors as evidenced by a certain measure of predictability as players cross that threshold. To me, the way we as fans and the industry itself views the minors versus the majors in terms of attention, compensation, media exposure etc. is responsible for that view.

And the so-and-so was...this guy.

I had never seen this before but the British Library has a wonderful way of viewing some of their material. They also have a new beta that uses Microsoft Silverlight.