Archive for the 'Non-Basketball' Category

John Brattain didn't write about basketball. Rather, baseball was his specialty, and few people brought as sharp a wit to the blogosphere as he did in his analysis of the American Pastime.

But now comes the terrible news that John passed away this week, at the age of 44.

As someone who recently experienced a loss on this level, I know that there are few words I can type to make things better for John's wife and children. Besides, plenty of writers better than me have written fine appreciations of John's life and his work.

So from all of us at Sports Reference, I simply wanted to offer our heartfelt condolences and prayers to his family during this time of grief. I hope his wife and daughters know that many people all over the world are thinking of and praying for them right now, and I hope knowing that gives them some small measure of comfort (just as it did for me several months ago).

R.I.P. John. He will be missed.

This is a basketball blog, as I'm sure you're aware of by now, but the plain truth is that much of the statistical analysis we do here is either derived from, inspired by, or at least tangentially connected to the pioneering work done in baseball's Sabermetrics, the older, more well-known sister field of APBRmetrics.

And for many of us, the epochal moment of our sabermetric lifetime came when Michael Lewis wrote a little book called Moneyball way back in 2003. The concepts were old hat to Bill James devotees, but never before had they been presented in such a mainstream way, with such a compelling test case as Billy Beane's Oakland A's. For all intents and purposes, statistical analysis in sports hit the big-time with the publishing of Moneyball.

Read the rest of this entry »