We Fired the BLEPH Guy

By now, we imagine you have all heard about BLEPH. A few weeks ago, The Onion published an article that quoted FanGraphs contributor Derek Gardner extensively. In that article, Derek purported to be speaking on behalf of the entire analytics community in advocating for a new statistic called BLEPH. “We don’t care what it measures or how it’s calculated,” he said. “We just need something called B.L.E.P.H., and we need it now.” This is not the full truth, and we feel compelled to set the record straight.

First, we want to make it clear that Derek Gardner no longer works for FanGraphs. He was terminated for cause. Second, we take our stats seriously. We would never manufacture a new statistic just for the sake of creating a fun acronym. Because baseball analysis is already drowning in alphabet soup, we have a strict policy against creating new junk stats and acronyms unless we’re convinced that they’ll meaningfully expand the boundaries of sabermetric knowledge. We call it the Baseball Utility Terminology Threshold for Stopping Lighthearted Acronym Proliferation (BUTTSLAP).

That high standard never wavers. It’s what pushed us to publish groundbreaking research about when baseball players do the most sex, to create a metric that will help Jack Reacher avoid getting murdered, and to invent legitimate, informative statistics like OOPSY, MeatWaste, ShadowBalls, Whomps per Whiff, Tromps per Whomp, Hard-Hit Rate Hit Rate (HHRHR), Crap the Bed Rate (CTB%), and EKSTRYM+.

This rigor is, in part, the reason that BLEPH became a national story in the first place. Before we get into the specifics, though, we should explain why we’re making all this public. In recent years, we’ve been inspired to learn that when we’re honest about our vision for the site and the challenges it faces, it can inspire a sense of camaraderie in our readers. All the same, that openness hasn’t normally extended to firings.

Even if it doesn’t work out here at FanGraphs, we wouldn’t want to do anything that could keep our writers from succeeding in their future endeavors. When we decided, after a probationary period of 10 years and 3,501 articles, that Dave Cameron wasn’t a good fit for our long-term plans, we kept it quiet. We didn’t announce when we fired Jeff Sullivan out of spite for singlehandedly wrecking the sabermetrician attractiveness curve, when we got sick of looking up the right way to spell “August Fagerstrom,” or when we stripped Carson Cistulli of his CMS access for the unforgivable crime of writing like Carson Cistulli. We have watched their success working on the team side with immense pride, regardless of the fact that they just couldn’t hack it as baseball writers.

This situation is different. We regret hiring Derek Gardner and we feel compelled to say so publicly. As such, we are taking the unorthodox step of laying out in detail the reasons for his termination, and we are publishing transcripts and screenshots of his interactions with our editorial staff.

We had high hopes for Derek when we hired him as a contributor. He submitted a sparkling writing sample, and during his interview, he displayed a deep knowledge of baseball analytics. Shortly after onboarding, he pitched an idea for his first article. The topic was the pinch-hitter penalty, and it was accepted enthusiastically.

Meg Rowley: Hey Derek, we’re so excited to have you aboard! Let me know when there’s something you’d like to write about. Once it’s approved, you can claim it in the main channel.

Derek Gardner: So my idea is to have one number you can quickly check to see if the pinch-hitter would actually be an improvement over the current batter. Like a Breakeven Level Expectancy for Pinch-Hitters (BLEPH).

Meg Rowley: Heh, that sounds like a great first piece, Derek. When do you think you might have it ready?

Derek Gardner: Tomorrow.

Meg Rowley: Tomorrow it is! Can’t wait.

But Derek never wrote that article. Instead, he disappeared for three weeks before pitching an idea for an entirely new article. This next piece pertained to how the handedness of the pitcher might affect the length of a baserunner’s lead.

Meg Rowley: Hey Derek, just checking in because I haven’t heard from you in a while. Is everything ok? Do you know when you’ll have that pinch-hitting piece ready?

Derek Gardner: Hey Meg that thing was way off base. I’m working on something new. It’s gonna be about how runners on first get shorter leads off lefties, so you have to take that into account to measure lead length accurately. Baserunning Lead Equivalency by Pitcher Handedness, you know?

Meg Rowley: Wait, so would that also be called BLEPH?

Derek Gardner: huh. that’s weird

Meg Rowley: Do you know when you’ll file this one?

Derek Gardner: bleph

It quickly became a pattern. Derek would promise an article, disappear for weeks at a time, then emerge with an entirely different idea. Well, entirely different except for the BLEPH part. Derek proposed a new defensive alignment for the late innings called the Base Line Endgame Positioning Hypothesis. He pitched a way of weighting defensive miscues based on the game situation called the Bases Loaded Error Penalty Heuristic. At one point, he mixed things up by proposing a way to use Statcast’s bat tracking metrics to model home run totals: Bat Barrel Longitudinal Late/Early Evaluation Postulate for Predicting Hard-Hit Homers, or BBLLEEPPHHH.

All of these ideas were approved by our editors. But Derek never delivered any of them, and his interactions with us, his coworkers, grew fraught. When it was suggested that BLEPH might not be the best acronym for his proposed method for including run expectancy into a new pitching stat, he did not react well. (For reasons that will become clear very quickly, from this point forward we will be posting actual screenshots of Derek’s Slack messages.)

Eventually, Derek seemed to run out of ideas, or it might have been that he just ran out of words that started with B, L, E, P, and H. His pitches got weaker and weirder, and once we started rejecting them, his temper got shorter.

We learned later that when we began rejecting Derek’s odder ideas, he started looking to publish them elsewhere. This may not be a complete list, but we know that he pitched articles about BLEPH to Baseball Prospectus, ESPN, MLB.com, SABR’s Baseball Research Journal, and, for reasons we don’t fully understand, the Annals of the American Thoracic Society.

When those plans failed, it seems that Derek somehow found a way to convince The Onion not only that BLEPH was forthcoming, but that the entire analytical community was behind it. In fact, he had been terminated just the day before the article was published. This was his last communication as a FanGraphs employee.

FanGraphs would like to apologize for our part in this fiasco, and we hope you understand why we felt the need to make all this public. The sabermetric community deserves to know how it found itself reduced to caricature by no less an authority than America’s greatest news source. Our readers deserve to know that we haven’t compromised our integrity for the sake of a silly acronym.

We will attempt to learn from this mistake by overhauling our hiring procedures and instituting a best-in-class background check program. If you want to write for FanGraphs in the future, you’d better be ready to submit a writing portfolio, a long list of references, a credit history, and a whole lot of bodily fluids. Get ready to be swabbed in some intimate places.

We will also be instituting a newer, even more rigorous standard for all future statistical coinages. We were going to call it the Baseball Lexicon Enhancement Protocol Hierarchy, but now that we see that written out, we’ll probably just call it BUTTSLAP 2.