Stats 101 with Dayn Perry

Based on both the quality and the insane amount of content he produced on ESPN.com starting in the mid 90s, Rob Neyer was easily the person most responsible for exposing me, and I suspect many others who were too young to appreciate Bill James' work in the 1980s, to more enlightened ways of thinking about baseball. He's still doing great work obviously, but I often wonder if his influence on the uninitiated has waned somewhat due to ESPN's decision to place him behind the wall of Insider.

For this reason, I'm really liking Dayn Perry's Stats 101 features over at Fox Sports. Sure, I and many of my readers were talking about VORP and the defensive spectrum years ago and have more or less internalized the information those things convey, but the fact remains that despite the steady spreading of the gospel over the past several years, the pool of SABRliterates out there is still relatively insular and relatively small compared to baseball fandom at large. While the research being done on the vanguard is really cool, it's important that we don't so caught up in the advanced stuff that we forget to explain the basics to folks who are where we were, sabermetrically speaking, in 1999.