bruinsfan911, Managing Editor
Hello Hardball Stitches! My name is Ellis, but most people in these corners of the internet know me by the moniker bruinsfan911. I've had several people ask which bruins that refers to, and the answer is the Boston Bruins (rather than the UCLA Bruins.) More specifically, it refers to a singular Boston Bruin: Marc Savard who at the time that I created my WIS account was one of our stronger offensive threats (this was pre-concussion.) As you may have guessed with the Bruins as my NHL team, I'm a New Englander and die hard Red Sox fan, but I'm happy to have taken up residence in virtual Dodger Stadium and southern California...hopefully I can replicate recent MLB history!!
Anyhoodles, the goal of this post is to introduce myself (done) and then tell you a little bit about what I will be contributing to the blog. There are three segments that I will definitely be doing on a regular basis. The first of these is a Hall of Fame deep dive using a wide variety of advanced statistics that the spreadsheets mini and I have created will both calculate and keep track of. This is something I have been doing for just over thirty seasons in FYC and across basically all of my worlds since I started there. Over the years my methodology for that has evolved based on the data that I have available, but having the chance to track all of the data that I'd like to right from Day One was a big part of the reason that I jumped at being a part of Hardball Stitches.
Secondly, I'll be doing another one of my traditional segments from other worlds: A look at the Awards Ballot for every season. This segment originally grew out of my desire to have a good way to compare both the hitters and pitchers for the Rookie of the Year Awards. I can't remember exactly when it happened, but at some point I decided to calculate the Wins Above Replacement totals for those ten candidates to make it more like comparing apples to apples (A+ card game, by the way) rather than apples to oranges. My next thought was "if I'm going to calculate that for those guys I might as well do it for all of the guys on the ballot too." Third on the hit parade was "well if I'm going to do all that work and I'm already writing other blog posts it makes sense to share so that it's not just me taking this math into consideration for the voting process."
Thirdly, being in a world from Day One makes tracking Trade Trees much, much, much easier which is always something that I have been interested in doing and have done so somewhat successfully before. However, being able to keep up with the twists and turns from the very beginning rather than starting 30 or 40 seasons into a world's history means that I'll be able to track twists and turns in real time and the spreadsheets mentioned above will make it possible to have "live" aka season-by-season updates on the WAR totals attached to the various branches of the trade trees that start to grow.
As I have eluded to several times so far, I have either run or contributed to a number of blogs throughout my Hardball career including all of my current worlds: FYC, Plumpy Rules!, Stickball and Around The Horn. Back in my blog hay day when I only had one world and was running FYC's blog pretty much solo, I published the following poll via Google Forms about potential segments:
