His career OPS .933 is fantastic. His career wOBA was .405 – over 8600 plate appearances over 18 seasons, he produced at the level of Alex Rodriguez in 2009. This is phenomenal, especially when considering that this includes both his pre-peak and post-attrition numbers. His 544 wRAA translate to nearly 54 wins added with his bat alone
Hello, Typepad is in serious danger of becoming a fangraphs reblog. But Fangraphs is not just a blog! They also produce my current favorite iphone app. And I've mentioned this before, but their crowdsourcing projections project is the most interesting thing to happen in the field of fantasy sports in a while.
Bloomberg is investing in the fantasy space now, in a deal done directly with MLB Advanced Media, who is hoping to win fantasy business from CBS, Yahoo and ESPN.com. The online fantasy experience is abysmal, and people spend hours and hours and then more on fantasy web sites. (Not me, but "people.")
Why is this worth Bloomberg's while? It's the audience, stupid. (Not you, but "people.") Jay B. Lee of Bloomberg says: “We saw the trend of the old cigar-chomping G.M.’s giving way to newer, tech-savvy people who ran and owned teams — some of whom were Bloomberg customers.”
Last year saw the Baseball Prospectus team's profile explode - Nate Silver moved into politics, they were all over television and of course the web - on their own properties, on major media sites like espn.com, and side projects like 538.com. This year we'll see independent wizards (like Jack Moore of Fangraphs) get snapped up not just by teams and research organizations, but by media companies like MLB Advanced Media and Bloomberg who see the huge potential in both the dollars available in the space and the quality of the product. In the article above, the New York Times cites the potential market as a multiple of GMs or teams, but the number of fantasy players is obviously many hundreds of thousands of times bigger than that.
I somehow doubt Edgar will make the Hall because the people who do the nominations strike me as some of the least progressive types around, but on the other hand I've seen an increasing amount of former "grit and hustle and desire" stalwarts refer to stats like UZR to praise legitimately good defensive players, so maybe there's hope. It would be a welcome miracle, that's for sure.
Posted by: ptp | December 07, 2009 at 01:08 PM