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What is this site all about?
by Primer Staff

The Baseball Primer grew out of a series of phone calls made between Jim Furtado and Sean Forman during the 1999-2000 winter. We were a little burned out working on the 2000 Big Bad Baseball Annual and were looking for a new direction to go in baseball analysis. We both were concerned that sabermetrics was becoming too obscure and too insulated from the general baseball fan. For instance, neither Sean's father or brother are particularly interested in reading our sabermetric pieces, even though they both are big sports fans. We decided that we needed to look for a slightly different way to present baseball analysis.

Many of the authors here will be familiar from the Big Bad Baseball Annual. We both have written for the BBBA, though not in the last edition. We like the book and the people associated with it, but we wanted to move in a less technical direction. We'll see how it plays out, but we like the mix of familiar and new writers that we've assembled here.

Sabermetrics doesn't have all the answers. Sammy Sosa, Steve Finley and many others have proven that stathead analysis doesn't know for certain how players will perform. The Yankees are either tremendously lucky or clutch or have great chemistry to make it through four of five postseasons as easily as they have. We want to combine scouting and analytical techniques to offer a more complete picture of baseball.

The focus of this site will likely evolve as time goes on, but at least in the beginning, we hope to bring together a wide variety of voices to discuss baseball. You should feel free to agree or disagree with any or all of our authors, but we hope that we will at least make you think a little along the way. Naturally, most of our attention will be on what is happening on the field right now, but we also want to feature articles on baseball's past and off the field issues.

Making analysis accessible and interesting to a majority of baseball fans is one of our primary goals. This means you don't need a degree in mathematics to follow our articles. We will attempt to provide additional depth where needed, but we aren't going to try and snow you under an avalanche of ratios and formulas. We will bring in new stats along the way, but we'll make every effort to be consistent across articles and support our arguments with facts.

Reader feedback is vitally important to what we hope to do. Readers are encouraged to leave comments, suggestions, critiques of anything we write. We will just as prominently feature praise and criticism on our articles. We don't have all the answers, but we really love baseball and we hope that shows up in our writing.

Thanks for visiting and we hope you'll come back...repeatedly!

Sean Forman and Jim Furtado
March 13, 2001

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