Look, Edna! His BABIP went up!

I am a strange variety of sports fan. While I am absolutely delighted for the opportunity to drill down into all sorts of statistics and minutia, I only bother when I find a team that is comprised of players that I enjoy for their personalities.

I am sort of a wonk-humanist.

Two sites of note for the baseball wonk:

Fangraphs gives a live chart for every game showing the percentage possibility that one or another team might win during the course of the game (it loads live - so you can watch the line graph chug across the graph while important plays are marked and annotated). After the game is over you can also see the players on both teams ranked as to how much they caused their team to win or lose. I'm sure the players love the hell out of that.


(If you look at the game dates, you'll have an idea of how long I've been putting this post off.)

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Back in the 1990's when the internet and I were young, all of the Major League ball clubs maintained their own websites. Now they have all been scooped up as separate domains in the Major League Baseball website. I think that stinks. I loved the way the individual clubs had the ability to take control of their own design.

Another thing that I loved is that many teams posted their pre-game press releases. These things were 8-12 pages of minutia for the guys calling the game to draw upon in case the game got boring or something odd happened ("Well Jim, as I recall, the last time a third baseman for this team had back to back home runs was...").

Well, it looks like MLB has answered my prayers. Here is the collected pre-game press notes for all the teams. If you are so inclined, go drown in the stats.