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December 28, 2012

Raising Aces

The Ghost of Articles Past

by Doug Thorburn

The end of the year is a time for reflection, and a flip of the calendar sparks reminders of past resolutions while we take stock of our goals for the new year.

The year 2012 was my first as a contributor to Baseball Prospectus, following two years in the BP system at Baseball Daily Digest, a subsidiary of the BP brand that was founded by Joe Hamrahi and has since graduated dozens of writers to the big stage. I have learned much during my rookie season with the ballclub, and though my recent two-part series on Making the Grade was a reasonable summary of the campaign, I have found myself thinking back to those days at BDD, remembering the lessons that shaped my work into something that was palatable to the BP audience.

I joined BDD with a solid baseball background but lacking the writing skills to properly convey my ideas to the online audience. There was a learning curve as I introduced the concepts of “Raising Aces” to the internet, from the development of grades to the theoretical principles that support them, and it might surprise some of the readers to learn that I even wrote about topics that were outside the realm of pitching.

There are some fresh ideas in store for Raising Aces in 2013, and my goal is to steadily improve the final product to produce the best possible content for our readers. The following history lesson tracks the development of the Raising Aces series, underscoring the evolution of the process in the hope that it will lead to future inspiration or revelation, and I encourage the readers to offer their constructive criticism in the comments section. The suggestion box is open, and I am listening.

Mechanics
My debut article for BDD was a breakdown of Game 1 of the 2009 NLDS, with Cliff Lee leading the Phillies against Ubaldo Jimenez and the Rockies. The matchup was an easy opportunity to discuss the mechanical underpinnings of pitch command, with the contrast of the erratic Jimenez and the pinpoint Lee, while offering a sidebar about their opposing methods of striding toward the plate. I had not yet developed the pitching grades on a 20-80 scale, and the piece was written as more of a running commentary than a targeted analysis. I was a WordPress rookie at the time, and my first article was lacking GIFs, pictures, or properly-formatted tables.

Money quote from the article: “Ubaldo Jimenez learned the hard way that pure stuff is marginalized without consistent mechanics and timing, as Cliff Lee gave a live demonstration.”