First Post!

Well, I'm trying out this blogging thing for the first time. Although I am a recent graduate with a degree in English, I didn't do much free writing (let along any sort of blogging) in college. However, I am prone to surf the internet from time-to-time, so I hope I will be able to acquire the necessary information for this assignment.

To be honest, during this entire first paragraph I had no idea what I was going to become an "expert" on; however I have come up with the most ideal topic for myself and my own interest. I am currently ready Michael Lewis' novel "Moneyball", which is based on a concept created by Bill James, baseball statistician. Instead of following conventional methods of evaluating players, such as batting average, runs batted etc..., James felt that those sort of available statistics were not good enough. He also believed that there must be other statistics not yet discovered that people could use in order to correctly evaluate a player.

Through intense research on his own, James first created a statistic called runs created. Runs Created = (Hits + Walks) x Total Bases/ (At Bats + Walks). This sort of statistic now widely used by baseball franchises across the country, was somehow not known of before James. With this sort of thinking and his yearly release of his book "Baseball Abstract", James fostered a new field of thought amongst many statisticians (many of whom were wall street men simply finding a more interesting way to utilize their talents). This field of thought grew into the term "Sabermetrics". SABER is an acronym for Society For American Baseball Research.

As an avid baseball fan and overall sports fan in general, this is what I plan to blog about for the next few months. My goal is to become an expert on sabermetrics and the types of statistics that it looks at. An obvious dream job for me would to become a GM for a baseball team (although I know that path that one must take to get there is very tough). Possessing this sort of knowledge could be extremely helpful for me in this pursuit. I intend to search the blogs and website, of which there are plenty, in hopes of learning all I can about sabermetrics.