Hello, everyone. As you’ve probably noticed, this week marks the roll-out of the Talking Chop Baseball Analysis Primer. For some of you, everything therein will be remedial. For some of you, it may be wholly new. For hopefully at least one of you, it’s interesting.
In any case, as you get to the bottom of each post in the primer series, you’ll see that comments have been disabled. Why? Because these posts are meant to be around forever as references, rather than point-in-time content. As additional research is completed, or at other topics become prominent enough in discussions to be worth covering, they’ll be added to the series. Unfortunately, the way SB Nation content works, comments can only be active on a post for two weeks after publication. As a result, having comments enabled would be a little wacky, as each post would allow only those folks that read the topic within two weeks of it going up on the site to add questions or other thoughts at the bottom.
To that end, this post is intended to serve as the immediate comments section for the primer feature. The primer posts will go up once a day at 10:00 am ET for a week, which means comments on this post will be active up through the rollout and for one week thereafter. For anyone that finds this post (and all the other primer posts) after mid-February 2019, we highly encourage people to ask questions or leave thoughts in any TC comment section, or to email myself (Ivan) or Kris. After all, this is meant to be a learning tool, and learning certainly isn’t meant to stop after February 2019 or anything like that.
While I have you here, one last note: I cannot emphasize enough how much the primer is meant to be hardly a definitive thing, and more of a, “Hey, this is how I understand concepts in baseball analysis.” The Fangraphs glossary is better than this primer. Googling the concept you’re interested in and reading the key works associated with it is better than this primer. Pulling the numbers and playing with them yourself is better than this primer. The concepts and explanations herein aren’t meant to be the truth from on high, just the ramblings of someone who’s spent around a decade reading things about baseball. Maybe it’s helpful, maybe it isn’t, but my hope is that if anything, all the words that will be splashed across Talking Chop this week encourage some of you to dig into the data yourselves and draw your own hypotheses and conclusions about the best sport on the planet.
So, with that said, comment away! We’ll be around to answer any questions you may have, or make any corrections or notes you think are worthwhile.