TBC Site Updates

First of all, Happy College Baseball Opening Weekend (HCBOW)! An exciting time for those of us who like the College game and haven't see any action for a year.

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For various reasons ... that I will get into in a later post. The Tracker will return in a different form for all PREMIUM subscribers.

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Its easy to get off-track. Especially for me. The Baseball Cube is a labor of love. Its an albatross in my life. I love it. But its heavy. For a while, it was on the zeitgeist but with the evolution of "analytics", the site has been tossed to the side into the less "cool" of the genre of baseball sites. Why did I miss the boat on analytics? To start, I didn't have the bandwidth to understand. I was more concerned with beefing up the historical data. Quantity. Length instead of width. WAR is great but how can I compete with BR or Fangraphs or Baseball Savant. Next-level analytics. Meh. I lost my way. I started off on the cutting edge simply because I was providing a view of data on the web that nobody else had. Over time, analytics took over and The Baseball Cube faded into a secondary niche site with various datasets that people needed. But not the masses. Just a few hundred (Thousand?) people here and there. And that's fine. How does 1 person compete with the multi-employee companies (BR) and the corporations (MLB/ESPN). Well, I don't. They can have their zeitgeist. I'm going longitudinal. And I'll work harder than them, pound for pound, then any of them.

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Completed a touch-up project to fill in some missing salaries over the last 15 years. There were many records for players without a salary listed and so we researched and filled them in. This includes call-ups for 2019-2020 who never had their salary included. Most of the injected players had league minimum but not all. I also revised the League/Team ranks to be more accurate. If tied, players receive the same rank as opposed to the prior method. Also, players with minimum salary are not ranked for either the league or the team. Some salaries were corrected but mostly for players who had an entry level contract higher than the minimum. Many Japanese or Cuban players join MLB with a higher salary while some draft picks sign an entry level Major League contract as well.

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2020 Service Time has been added for all players who played at least 1 game in the Major Leagues in 2020.

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Small update for 2020. Added Uniform #s for 2020 MLB. I like Uniform #s displayed in the stat grids. College is also already up to date for 2020.

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++ Means added. I just made that up. But going forward, any new data added will have the ++ in the subject.

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Player bios are normally initiated when they start at a D1 college or are drafted/signed. This means that they are usually 18 years old are less and their height/weight attributes are for a teenager and not an adult male. And since I don't really have any yearly project to update these values, you'll often have seen many Major Leaguers weighing in at 170 which is most likely their Freshman Year weight.

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MLB stats being updated is not a big deal. 1000 other sites have up-to-date, more comprehensive MLB stats. This site update is more about my shift in focus.

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So TBC PREMIUM is going well despite the pandemic which has resulted in the sudden cancellation of the College Baseball season as well as the full minor league season. Not to mention the delayed MLB season. I am happy with the membership so far and I haven't received any negative feedback so I will take that as a good sign.

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Big project. Looking to rebuild College Baseball stats history. Starting with D1. TBC has 2002-present at about 99.8% completion. Now, trying to fill in historical stats.

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When you are 47, you tend to stray from the zeitgeist of the vernacular. Words appear out of nowhere from millenials. The kids have created this new language, truncating mine. At my day job, there are many millenials. Younger, smarter, sharper and nicer. Self-aware. But they use words that I have to google. Fam. Lit. Sick. Dope. Chill. GOAT. Once, at my company gym, a couple of friends told me that at first, I am intimidating as a co-worker because of my experience/knowledge but then they told me I was quite chill. The only thing I could think to say was "What does chill mean exactly?"

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This is one of the biggest projects each year. Stats for 1350+ schools have been added to the college section for 2020. With Division I being added earlier this summer, we have now added NCAA Division II and III, the NAIA and all Junior Colleges across the country including the NJCAA, the California JC league (CCCAA) and the Northwest Athletic Conference. The data included batting/pitching and basic team info. Players are linked to their profile if exists.

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Player salaries are a standard dataset. Given the circumstances of the shortened 2020 season, it is clear that the salary $ values do not reflect actual earned dollars for the year. The schedule will only be 60 games plus playoffs and the exact payment structure is not clear to me. All this to say that the 2020 salary values were the intended base salaries for each player for the year. I will be leaving the values as-is for ease of future comparison between seasons.

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A quick post to let you know that complete injury history for all active Major Leaguers since 2012 are now included on the player page under "Transactions".

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The Baseball Cube (that's me) has a new data product in the data store that I think might be underpriced so it might be a good time to get it now. For $45, you can get a list of all Injured List (IL) appearances for Major Leaguers since 1970 PLUS the added bonus of minor league IL appearances since 2012.

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All player bios for 2020 Division I College Baseball Players have been updated. 301 schools. Very many players. Lots of work. Glad it's done for the year.

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The 2020 MLB Draft was added to the site. Shortest draft in history at 5 rounds. From Torkelson to Whitcomb.

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The MLB entry draft will take place on June 10-11 and will be only 5 rounds instead of the usual 40. Next year's draft will only be 20 rounds. The strategical impact will play out this week. Free agent signings will become a thing or maybe it won't. Nobody knows just yet.

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My daughter is only 15. She wants to play US College Softball. She oscillates between typical teenage girl and softall fanatic. We watch NCAA Softball games at the dining room table. She rewinds all the great plays. She understands almost EVERYTHING about the game. She knows all the Power-5 colleges. We practice outside every 2nd day for an hour. Her team practices 5 times a week on Zoom. I'm her catcher on Wednesday mornings, headphones on for my own daily huddle with my own workteam. I'm talking about data while she is throwing me changeups and drops. At nights, in darkness, I stand in the driveway launching missiles into the square-spotlight of the garage with my daughter standing in front of a net, working on backhands. 50 backhands. 50 short-hops. 50 more to her left. I can't throw hard enough to defeat her. The cars prone behind me, she hits my glove with her throws everytime. We're in Canada. We're in a good program but its not that easy to get noticed up here for College softball. My daughter wants D1. She will settle for D2. But I don't know. She's good but I don't know.

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