Welcome!

If people knew about this blog, here are some questions I expect they would frequently ask:

What is this Crap?

This crap is my blog. I'm planning to write about baseball and statistics with a shameless St. Louis bias. In my past blog experience, it seems I write about kind of whatever. So you may find a good deal of whatever in this space as well. Perhaps you will find that all of it is basically whatever, according to your judgement.

Who's that guy in the background?

That's Steve Kline, relief pitcher, Larussa-style grit guy and general weirdo from the early late-90's through 2000's. He's probably best know for never changing his hat throughout the season. As a kid, I thought that was a cool quirk. In retrospect, he was probably hiding pine tar all over that baby. Ah well, that's how it goes with heroes. I understand a portion of Mark McGwire's on-field accomplishments were not entirely on the up-and-up either.

Do you have a Steve Kline-type hat?

Yes, in fact I do! I've been wearing the same hat for the past 4-5 seasons of rec league softball.

It doesn't compare to Steve's, but to be fair it's only got about 50 games on it. Mr. Kline never appeared in fewer than 66 games in a Cardinal uniform.

Gross. So why are you doing this again?

Oh yeah. About my blog. For career advancement purposes, I've been attempting to learn about the statistical programming language R. Analyzing data requires that you know about something that involves data. Unfortunately, I have no in-depth knowledge of any important world-history-altering data-heavy domains like genome analysis or even financially lucrative domains like Walmart sales patterns. But I've spent half my life thinking about baseball*, so I've got that! I'm working through the book Analyzing Baseball Data with R, which I've heard is good.

* I've loved baseball pretty much my whole life, but only on a half-time basis. School, girls who didn't talk to me and computers took up a good part of my early life. Now I have a job, so I'm required to think about that 8 hours a day.

So that's it?

Yep, enjoy!*

* The the extent possible, given my writing skills.