Stolen Signs

We go through a rough outline of the history of sabermetrics. And we also want to ask for your help. We’re sure we missed things. If you know of so key point in the history of sabermetrics, please help us add to our list. 

This is the first in a new recurring series called Stats and Storytellers. We’re excited to welcome Jonah Keri as our first guest. Our conversation was wide-reaching and really interesting. We talked about Jonah’s recent article about the Expos mascot, Youppi, getting ejected from a game back in 1989, touched on the stats behind why he thought Tim Raines deserved to be in the Hall of Fame. Jonah reflected on his time at BP (and elsewhere), and we had a great discussion about the ins and outs of writing about statistics. 

This week we talked to Rob Arthur of FiveThirtyEight and Jim Albert, professor of mathematics and statistics at Bowling Green State University about Rob’s article Baseball’s ‘Hot Hand’ Is Real, co-authored by Greg Matthews assistant professor of statistics at Loyola University Chicago. We covered specifics of the article and the research behind it and also delved into how we can present statistical analysis to the general public in a way that’s both rigorous and accessible.

On Episode 2 of Stolen Signs we briefly recap SaberSeminar 2017, answer a listener email about how to learn more about baseball stats, and we have a discussion about pitching metrics with Jonathan Judge of Baseball Prospectus and Neil Weinberg of FanGraphs.
You can email Kendall and Harry at stolensigns@baseballprospectus.com and follow them on Twitter @stolensigns.

This is episode 1 of the Stolen Signs podcast, a new podcast from the stats team at Baseball Prospectus. Your hosts Kendall Guillemette and Harry Pavlidis introduce the show, themselves and talk to Jeff Long and Kate Morrison about their presentation at SaberSeminar 2017 about pitch selection, sequencing, and tunnels.
You can email Kendall and Harry at stolensigns@baseballprospectus.com and follow them on Twitter @stolensigns.