

Moneyball Update - figital
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/otl/columns/story?columnist=bryant_howard&id=4357166

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figital
@lionhearted where do you get your raw basedball data? it's certainly a fun
way to learn/teach data mining but the folks at the top certainly are not
going to be publishing their formulas. ;)

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lionhearted
I like the discussion at sonsofsamhorn.net - a Red Sox forum, but a hell of a
lot of smart people there. They get their data from the regular sources,
there's lots of citing in threads. I don't datamine it out myself - nowhere
near enough free time.

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figital
Thanks for the rec. I just noticed Sean Layman's Baseball Archive which looks
to have individual plate appearances from 1973-2008 and is available in a SQL-
ready format:

<http://baseball1.com/content/view/57/82/>

This looks like it might be the same DB:

<http://sn.im/baseball-sql>

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lionhearted
I love baseball - because of its unique start and stop nature of relatively
isolated events, it's one of the easiest sports to do lots of interesting
analysis in.

As for Moneyball - first, high onbase is now getting much more recognition and
payment, and he's a bit of a victim of his own fame. His type of star he could
get undermarket, he now has a lot more competition for.

Second, the A's were thought to be able to contend this year - they even
traded for a top player (Matt Holiday) to try to put them over the top.
They'll probably contend next year in a weak Western division.

Most interesting - defense is probably the new onbase percentage. It's pretty
easy to track offense in baseball, and separate good and bad offense. Also
easy to track pitching. Defense? Not so much. There's not as many numbers
kept, and all the major defensive systems have serious flaws. For years, good
offense/bad defense players did really well financially and cost a lot. It's
changing a bit now, and better GM's are looking for average offense/great
defense as the new kind of bargain.

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jsonscripter
I was confused for about 3 minutes because I kept reading "Monkeyball".

