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John Thorn (born April 17, 1947) is a noted sports historian.
Thorn was born in Stuttgart, West Germany, and immigrated to the United States in 1949. He graduated from Beloit College in 1968.
Thorn is the author and editor of numerous books on baseball, including Total Baseball: The Official Encyclopedia of Major League Baseball, Total Football: The Official Encyclopedia of Major League Football, Treasures of the Baseball Hall of Fame, The Hidden Game of Baseball, and The Armchair Book of Baseball. He founded Total Sports Publishing and served as its Publisher from 1998-2002.
Thorn served as the senior creative consultant for the Ken Burns documentary Baseball (documentary).
In 2004 Thorn discovered documentation that traced the origins of baseball to 1791 in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.
His next book, Baseball in the Garden of Eden, will be published with Simon and Schuster in Spring 2008. Thorn writes two columns for the Woodstock Times: "Play's the Thing" (largely sports) and "Wake the Echoes" (arts and letters). He is also a columnist for Voices, the publication of the New York Folklore Society.
Thorn is also the co-author with Pete Palmer and Bob Carroll of The Hidden Game of Football.
In June 2006 SABR awarded Thorn its highest award, the Bob Davids Award. The award honors those whose contributions to SABR and baseball reflect the ingenuity, integrity, and self-sacrifice of the founder and past president of SABR, L. Robert "Bob" Davids.
Baseball Prospectus, sometimes abbreviated as BP, is a think tank focusing on sabermetrics, the statistical analysis of the sport of baseball. Baseball Prospectus has fathered several popular new statistical tools which have become hallmarks of baseball analysis.
Baseball Prospectus was founded in 1996 by Gary Huckabay, who recruited the initial contributor group of Clay Davenport, Rany Jazayerli, Christina Kahrl, and Joe Sheehan, with the publication of the first annual set of forecasts. The analysis and statistics favored by Baseball Prospectus has in various forms gained significant acceptance by the management of many Major League Baseball clubs, notably the Boston Red Sox and Cleveland Indians. BP has often been considered the modern successor to Bill James' Baseball Abstract series of books in the 1980sAs a legal entity, the organization is known as Prospectus Entertainment Ventures, LLC. Reflecting its legacy as a group of sabermetricians who met over the Internet, BP has no "main office." Working for BP is a second or part-time job for most of the regular staff, who conduct their work for BP in their own home or professional offices.
Prospectus Entertainment Ventures partners with Football Outsiders for the publication and promotion of ProFootball Prospectus (ISBN 0452288479).
On October 10, 2007, BP launched BasketballProspectus.com, a new website for the analysis of men's college and pro basketball, with Joe Sheehan taking the role of Managing Editor and announcing the lineup of principal writer-analysts for the site. Unlike BaseballProspectus.com, this website is free and does not require a subscription for full access. BP also plans to begin publishing an annual book, College Basketball Prospectus, beginning with the 2008 seasBaseball Prospectus creates several products:
The web site BaseballProspectus.com, which contains articles, statistical reports, and fantasy baseball tools. The site contains some free content, although it has become increasingly available only by paid subscription. A dozen authors write regular bylined columns on the site and numerous other writers contribute occasional articles. The site also covers baseball history as well as current issues and events, including games and series, injuries, forecasts, player profiles, baseball finance, and the player marketplace.[3] In December 2006, the site introduced a blog called "Baseball Prospectus: UNFILTERED." A best-selling annual book (current edition Baseball Prospectus 2008) that contains statistics and analysis of the past season and forecasts of the upcoming season. Other baseball-related books, such as Mind Game: How the Boston Red Sox Got Smart, Won a World Series, and Created a New Blueprint for Winning (2005) (ISBN 0-7611-4018-2) and Baseball Between the Numbers (2006) (ISBN 0-465-00596-9). The latter was chosen by the editors of Amazon.com as the best book on baseball (and third best on sports in general) published in 2006.[4] A syndicated and podcasted radio show, Baseball Prospectus Radio (BPR). In June 2007, the regular weekly programming of BPR ended. However, the site continues to provide podcasts, online audio and video, and to explore how to integrate such features into more of its regular content. As of September 2007, a daily podcast of approximately five minutes was provided, called the Baseball Prospectus Rundown. The annual Internet Baseball Awards, started in 1996, based on fan voting for the Rookie of the Year, Manager of the Year, Cy Young, and Most Valuable Player in each of the two major leaguesThe website BaseballProspectus.com began in 1997 primarily as a way to present original sabermetric research; publish advanced baseball statistics such as EqA, the Davenport Translations (DT’s), and VORP; and promote sales of the annual book. Beginning in 2003, the site placed most of its new articles, its PECOTA forecasts, and some of its statistical databases in a “premium” section that could be accessed only by subscription.
Until 2007, when the site began to post general advertising, the premium subscriptions and book sales were Baseball Prospectus' main source of revenues. Baseball Prospectus does not publish a financial report or information about its subscriber base, but it appears to be using its income to expand its breadth of coverage to attract new customers,[6] and it has not increased its subscription prices since initiating its premium service. It also offers a subscription to those interested in fantasy baseball, at a lower price than the premium subscriptions and giving access to fewer features and articles.
BaseballProspectus.com has a corps of staff writers who publish articles on a regular (typically weekly) basis under a featured heading (see list of "Regular Writers" below). In addition, occasional articles are published by other BP staff or freelance authors. Some former regular writers no longer appear on the site but can be found writing for other media or employed on the staffs of major league baseball organizations (including as of 2007 the Cleveland Indians[7], the Tampa Bay Rays[8]), and the Pittsburgh Pirates.[9][10] Some current regular BP writers also appear simultaneously in other media including ESPN.com and ESPN Radio, FoxSports.com, Sports Illustrated and SI.com, the New York Sun, the New York Times, Playboy Magazine, and the YES Network.
Although the site maintains its sabermetric core and has expanded its statistical databases (most of which are open to non-subscribers), it now regularly attends to issues such as baseball prospects (the First Year Player Draft and minor league baseball), international baseball, the economics and business of baseball (valuation of players, team and stadium finances, the player marketplace),[11], and fantasy baseball (PECOTA, the "Fantasy Focus" series of articles, forecast manager and other fantasy tools). As BP has begun in addition to publish monographs on specialized topics, it has delved into the application of sabermetric analysis to historical topics – an emphasis clearly seen in Mind Game (2005 – a history of the Boston Red Sox), Baseball Between the Numbers (2006 – which addresses some historical comparisons), and It Ain’t Over 'til It’s Over (2007 – about historical pennant races).
Baseball Prospectus researchers have concluded that there is no repeatable ability of clutch hitting. As writer Joe Sheehan said, "Over the course of a game, a month, a season or a career, there is virtually no evidence that any player or group of players possesses an ability to outperform his established level of ability in clutch situations, however defined."[12] They cite studies which find that there is insignificant correlation between year-to-year performance in clutch situations.
In an article published in 2006, Nate Silver argued that clutch hitting ability does exist to a degree. He argued that although not as important as traditional baseball analysis would suggest, clutch hitting ability was more significant than other sabermetric studies had shown. The article also found there to be a connection between clutch hitting ability and situational hitting, or the ability to adjust a hitting approach to fit the given situationBaseball Prospectus writers often argue that traditional baseball statistics such as RBIs, wins, and Batting Average are poor reflections of a player's true contributions. For example, they have argued that RBIs are too dependent on factors outside of the player's control, namely the production of other hitters in the lineup.[14][15] They similarly argue that wins are too affected by factors such as the team's offense and bullpen
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