BR.com's Sports Reference Blog

The text linked is part of a memo that I prepared on October 17, 2004 for Mark Fainaru-Wada from the San Francisco Chronicle and co-author of Game of Shadows. I was paid for this research, and they have graciously allowed me to reprint it here. As my comments, may indicate I was skeptical of Bonds’s steroid use at the time. I have not read the book and have not formulated an opinion I care to share.

I just hope the pool is full of water.
For the last six years I’ve had a day job of college professor of math and cs at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia and a part-time job/hobby of a web designer (mostly for baseball-reference.com). It has been really stressful at times. I know I’ve neglected my wife. Not gotten enough sleep and generally worked too hard at satisfying both jobs. It has been frustrating as well, because I have pages and pages of ideas I would like to try at BR, but little time to implement them.

I feel I’ve done all right at both jobs. Recently, the site has been doing well financially, and there seem to be more potential investors and partners sniffing around than ever before. In mathworld, I did just get tenure at Saint Joseph’s. However, I’ve always wondered just what I could get done on Baseball-Reference.com and its sister sites if I had a lot of 40 hour work weeks to work on it. So…

Last week, I went into my department chair’s office and asked for a leave of absence to do just that. I don’t know that it will be a long-term gig, but for the next year at least, I’ll be working on BR full-time.

This is one of those scary/exciting times where I’m not quite sure what the next 12 months will hold, but I think it will be an “interesting time”. Hopefully, that will be a blessing and not a curse.

Also, I would be remiss if I didn’t thank the people at Saint Joseph’s for six great years, it’s unclear if I’ll be back, but I really enjoyed my time there, and they have been very supportive of my career at all times. And thank you to the people who have supported Baseball-Reference.com and made this possible. I hope that your support will be rewarded with many more great baseball-reference.com features.

Amazon.com: Baseball Hacks : Tips & Tools for Analyzing and Winning with Statistics (Hacks): Books: Joseph Adler

Lots of tips and tricks for gathering and hacking data. Learning R is something that I clearly need to do. I also need to read my perl graphics books. I really would like to add some graphics to the sites at some point.

I used to have a blog called Outside the box. I like to think it was the first baseball blog ever, but I think there was one or two before it. Regardless, it fell by the wayside. I then had some posts on a blog called outside the box at Baseball Primer.com. I think most of those were lost in Jim’s switch to expression engine.

This blog is really just an effort to converse with BR users. I’m going to be running new things by users here and as the level of activity on the site starts to increase, I think this will be a great outlet to get user feedback and help.

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