I’m pleased to announce that Clay Davenport is now working with Baseball Prospectus on a full-time basis.
Clay was one of the original five founding members of Baseball Prospectus (which Steven Goldman reminisces about in the preface of Baseball Prospectus 2010), and his statistics have formed the building blocks of the Baseball Prospectus operation since its inception. Even before that, those of you who have been with us since the Usenet days will remember the awesome Davenport Translations reports that Clay used to spool out to rec.sport.baseball in the mid-1990s. In addition to the DTs, Clay is the creator of the True Average (TAv) performance metric, which until recently was known as Equivalent Average (EqA), and has been responsible for most of the statistical product in the annuals. At the website, Clay’s the keeper of the Adjusted Standings and Playoff Odds reports, the DT player cards (which will soon be converted to the new PECOTA.beta format), and the Depth Charts. Clay’s also a wonderful writer whose work we’ve always wanted to publish more regularly.
In his spare time, Clay likes long walks on the beach, Dan Brown novels, and classical music of the baroque period.
Clay Davenport has been the statistical backbone of Baseball Prospectus since day one on a strictly limited time basis, while holding down a day job. We’re happy that we were able to reverse Baseball Prospectus’ recent trend of some of our best talent being hired away by others and bring Clay on board on an exclusive basis. Clay’s responsibilities will include managing the completion of the translation of PECOTA from its previous form to something we can run quickly and regularly; assisting in the creation of research and metrics; and writing regularly for Baseball Prospectus Premium subscribers.
I don’t usually sound this press release-y, but that’s how excited we all are to be taking this step.
Wow, awesome news! I also have hated to see BP writers whom, in some cases, I'd been reading for years (over a decade, in some cases) go elsewhere, so it is definitely great to see one of the founding five come on board full-time.
It's great that Clay is on the team full-time, but it looks to me like BP also needs some basic blocking & tackling. Today's E-mail version of the newsletter has broken links, the version here on the website is truncated, and the link to Next Newsletter (which shouldn't be active) goes to December, 1989. Seems like there's more than a few minor glitches hitting the fan -- & the fans!
I found a couple of issues in our web newsletter that have been fixed - please feel free to let us know at cs@baseballprospectus.com if you find anything else.
What link was broken for you? I believe that any active links that show up in the email version of the newsletter are put there by your mail program (we don't send out anchor tags in the email newsletter, just plaintext links), so I think what happened there is that your mailreader and browser had some trouble with some of our partial website references in one of the descriptions (which weren't really intended to link, just name a website). Let us know if this sees incorrect.
Finally, I think the newsletter truncation you noted today is due to some scheduling weirdness that occurred with our articles published for Monday - basically the articles that would have normally showed up in today's newsletter had already shown up in yesterday's, so they didn't get sent again. We're sorry about that - we'll try to get that normalized so it doesn't happen again.
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Wow....great news!