Mary S. Butler

Do you ever wonder who is behind the blogs listed in the ubiquitous blogrolls on sites you visit? This post is the first in a series of interviews I’ll do with the bloggers who populate the right rail of this page. First up is Dave Tainer, the stats geek and Bill James fanboy who publishes the Sabermetrati: Pythagorean Baseball blog. Why is he first? Well, being married to a fellow blogger does have its privileges.

Q. What is your site about?

A. The main purpose of Sabermetrati during the baseball season is to provide a daily prediction of what the final standings will look like according to my derivation of Bill James Pythagorean Wins Expectation theorem. Basically, the runs a team scores and gives up correlates directly to the number of wins and losses they should have. I have produced my numbers and written about them for bigshoulderssports.com for the last four years and have an over 75 percent accuracy rate from the midpoint of the season (usually, the all-star game).

Q. How did you come up with the name of your blog?

A. Sabermetrati comes from my cute-ification of the secret society within a secret society of the Masons, the illuminati; the society within a society of baseball stats geeks, or sabermetricians (which comes from Society for American Baseball Research–SABR).
Ed note: Dave also publishes the Illumi-Technorati blog.

Q. I know that you have recently become addicted to checking your blog’s Google Analytics reports and have a good idea of how visitors got to your site. What kind of people do you think are most likely to visit Sabermetrati?

A. Baseball crosses all sorts of gender, age, education, income and pop culture interests. I try to pitch this to an average baseball fan, but one with an interest of the game from a scientific perspective.

Q. When did you start getting into Bill James and why?

A. I first heard about Bill James around 1981, and didn’t buy his Baseball Abstract until 1984 (it had been published in some form or another since 1977). I had read a few of his articles in Baseball Digest previously. I found him interesting from the fact that statistics could be so useful in creating winning baseball. I used much of the knowledge gained from his work to always win in my Strat-O-Matic leagues!

Q. Please explain the new baseball stat you invented this year.

A. What I’m currently calling my “Real World Magic Number” (I don’t like the name–anyone have ideas?) is basically a derivation of a regular Magic Number, but with the incorporation of my predictive baseball standings, which is the main in-season element of my blog. In essence, it lets you determine the number of games that the first place team needs to clinch in reality. It’s almost a version of Bill James’ “Safe Lead” in basketball idea in that the number can change, but the odds of it being wrong are astronomical.

Q. The more you know about the stats of the game, is it more difficult to watch a game for pure enjoyment? Are you calculating standings in your head after each play?

A. My enjoyment of baseball occurs on three levels: Playing it, Watching it and Discussing it. The stats part comes more in the discussion of it. On the other hand, the stats are intrinsically part of the game so I can’t really divorce any of those three aspects from one another. For instance, now I think win probability when the game is in the later innings, though, no I do not calculate it in my head!

Q. How has doing this blog affected your fantasy baseball standings?

A. Because you pick individual players in fantasy baseball, this blog has had no effect to my techniques of selecting like skills to lead in like categories in a more-bang-for-your-buck approach.

Q. What will happen to your blog  after the baseball season is over?

A. After the baseball season is over, the blog will turn into a discussion of the Hot Stove League, and the statistical applications involved in value for money of the various free agents. Also, it will be a research time to maybe come up other stats.

Q. Best White Sox team of all time vs. best Cubs team of all time — which one would win and why?

A. The AL Pennant-winning White Sox of 1905 defeated the better-hitting and better-pitching Cubs team in the first Subway World Series. And this was the good Cubs — those of Tinker to Evers to Chance fame. The same Cubs team that won back-to-back World Series in 1907 and 1908 (their last). So we don’t have to go hypothetical! What would be an interesting Series, though, if this year’s Cubs win the World Series, is if they could beat the 2005 Champion White Sox …

Q. If you weren’t updating your baseball blog everyday you would be __________?

A. Reading somebody else’s baseball blog, namely Baseball Prospectus‘, which is the best (though unfortunately no longer free).