New issues of "By the Numbers" now available

Two new issues of “By the Numbers,” the SABR Statistical Analysis Newsletter that I edit, are now available at my website, www.philbirnbaum.com .

The August issue contains:

-- a review of two recent “Chance” articles by Charlie Pavitt;
-- an analysis by Victor Wang of the historical value breakdown between OBP and SLG;
-- a steroid-related study by Yoshio Muki and John Hanks, showing that sluggers today see their power diminish much less slowly with age than they used to.

The November issue contains:

-- a Charlie Pavitt review of the JQAS recent paper on error rates;
-- an article by Gary Gillette and Pete Palmer on measuring middle relief performance, complete with updated data for 2006;
-- a study by Abbott Katz on the consistent historical relationship between at-bats and batting average.

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If you’re wondering why the August and November issues are coming out in January, it’s because we were short of material until recently. If you’re interested in contributing an article, we’d be pretty darn grateful. Even if you’ve already had a blog post on your work, or published it online, we’d be interested in having it. Our only rule is that we won’t publish an exact duplicate of something that’s appeared elsewhere – if you want to do some revisions, or update your data for a more recent year, or anything else that constitutes value added, we’re happy.

To see the kinds of articles we’ve used, check out the many back issues at the above link. (People have said that the February, 1999 issue was one of the best.)

“By the Numbers” goes out to about 1,000 SABR members – 900 by download, 100 by postal mail – of which some are “famous” established sabermetricians. I suspect that most BTN readers don’t frequent online sabermetrics sites, so you might consider a contribution as a way to reach a new audience.

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Thanks, and hope you enjoy the issues.