Back to the Grindstone

For the past several weeks, I’ve toyed with beginning an ongoing series of MLB 40-man roster evaluations, effectively serving as a SWOT analysis (just like with any other business) emphasizing the given team’s payroll, young cost-controlled talent, and specific areas of strength over a one-year (2011) and three-year (2011-2013) window. This, along with numerous ideas with it that I may pursue, would be quite a commitment given the scope of what I’d like to turn a project like that into. But the more important point for now is that after burning a lot of time on message boards recently, I’ve realized I’m interested in writing about the game again and in trying to build on my own knowledge of roster development and analysis in the context of MLB. In the process, I hope to offer thoughts that might be entertaining and/or informative for at least a couple of people out there somewhere. This may turn into a much greater project, or it may not. We’ll see how it goes.

For now, I’m going to begin a series of articles regarding important concepts to digest for tackling roster development and analysis. These topics are both ones that I would like to become better versed in discussing, as well as a number of subjects that will be necessary to preface any kind of team analysis. These concepts include things such as the amateur draft, the 40-man roster, the arbitration and free agency process, the Rule 5 draft, the international talent market, and so forth. They may also branch out to cover personal baseball management philosophies –the risk/reward continuum and why a balanced (diversified) farm system is important, constructing a realistic preseason depth chart (knowing it takes many, many more than 25 players to crawl through a 162-game season), anticipating and avoiding 40-man roster crunches, and so forth.

Finally, I have to imagine I will need and/or want to cover some statistical analysis as well – not necessarily the calculation of or nuts and bolts behind given statistics, but certainly the information needed to interpret them, as well as the limitations and context needed to avoid fooling ourselves into thinking that we can rely on numbers at their face value to “make” the correct decisions for us.

In all of these cases, I anticipate linking to all of these articles from the main page as a reference/resource list for use with whatever direction this site takes. I will also gradually grow a reference list of outside sources and must-reads to supplement (or preface) these discussions.

Simply put, I’m not sure exactly what I’m going to be doing with this, and I’m not claiming to be an all-knowing authority of a sport that many, many people smarter than me have extensively researched and built an impressive library of knowledge about. But I’d like to write several times a week again, and I think I have some things to offer that could help augment the way in which many baseball fans watch and understand the game. Stay tuned, and bookmark me if you’re intrigued!