The Sabermetric Library

Over the weekend, in a thread over at Tango’s blog, the idea of a “Sabermetric Library” was raised. As noted over there, one of the positives of the academic journal process is to catalog the work that has been done, making it easily searchable for future readers who are not following the discussion in real time. The statistical analysis crowd doesn’t have that kind of formal structure, which makes it difficult for those who come later to catch up on what has already been done.

Rather than employing a full time “librarian” to keep up with the most recent work, I thought perhaps we could just attempt to crowd-source this idea. So, that’s what we’ll attempt to do in this thread.

In the comments below, I’d like to encourage you to think back to influential articles that you’ve read about the game, and if you can, link to them. If they were written a book, link to it at a particular bookseller of your choice that carries it. If you can quickly summarize the conclusion, even better.

It doesn’t have to be an epic research piece that changed the face of analysis (such as Voros’ piece on DIPS), though those obviously fit in here, too. But if there is a blog post somewhere that explained something in a way that allowed you to understand it for the first time, link to that. If there was an interesting discussion on a popular topic (Blyleven for the HOF, maybe), then link to that.

The goal would be to populate the comments with enough resources to allow someone to go through and read a Best Of The Sabermetric Community collection of writings. There are a lot of good writers out there doing good work, but given the size of the internet, some of it can get lost in the shuffle. Let’s preserve the pieces that deserve to be kept alive, and at the same time, create a resource for those who come along in the future to find out about the work that has already been done.

In order to keep the layout easy to read, I would ask that you refrain from commentary about this post. Please limit comments to the format of linking to important pieces, with necessary comment about that piece as an abstract of sorts. If this takes off as I hope it does, we’ll do a discussion thread on another day about potentially culling the list, giving space for people to argue for or against any of the linked pieces below.