Bryan O’Connor lives in Cumberland, ME, with his wife and two children. Born in upstate New York, almost equidistant from six baseball teams, he chose the Blue Jays in the late ’80s and was rewarded with two world championships and a subsequent descent into anonymity. After moving to Boston in 1998, Bryan was enamored with the local fans’ hatred of all things pinstriped, as well as NESN, the cable channel devoted to summer-round coverage of Red Sox games, news, transactions, and Dennis Eckersley’s mustache.
Today, Bryan is an avid follower of the Red Sox and a rabid fan of all 29 teams with fewer than 12 past championships. More importantly, Bryan is a disciple of Bill James, the SABRmetric movement, and the many brilliant thinkers who have moved baseball analysis into the 21st century.
Replacement Level Baseball Blog 
Can you please start a replacement level football blog for me as well? I’d appreciate that, thanks.
It’s been 2 weeks since your last post. Did my comments make you want to get another blog and not tell me so I can’t follow you? If so, I’m sorry. Otherwise, I’d like you to post something about the trade deadline so I can vent in another arena how stupid Ruben Amaro, Jr, is. Thank you.
Almost equidistant from six baseball teams…you must be from Syracuse or Rochester?
Queensbury, actually, just north of Saratoga, though my parents grew up between Syracuse and Rochester. For the record, I grew up:
172 miles from Stade Olympique
208 miles from Shea Stadium
210 miles from Yankee Stadium
219 miles from Fenway Park
285 miles from Veterans Stadium
388 miles from SkyDome
So, yeah, Syracuse would be more equidistant (closer to Toronto, farther from Montreal), but none of these stadiums was a convenient day trip from home, but all of them were viable options for my affections.
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So you live in South Portland, Maine? Small world. I taught at S. Portland High School for three years just a few years ago. My family and I used to live in Waterboro, and before that, Gorham. We moved down to Greenville, S.C. about three years ago.
Like your blog. I’ll be following along.
Best Regards, Bill Miller
I thought you might be interested in a new baseball pitching metric that I co-created on 60ft6in.com. The Factor12 Rating (F12) is an analytic measurement utilizing league average performance to compare the value of all MLB pitchers. F12 consists of the following twelve statistics incorporating every aspect of pitching:
Innings Pitched (IP); Strikeouts Minus Walks (SO-BB); Fielding Independent Pitching (FIP); Earned Run Average (ERA); Walks plus Hits per Innings Pitched (WHIP); Home Runs per 9 innings (HR/9); Walks per 9 innings (BB/9); Strikeouts per 9 innings (SO/9); Opponents Batting Average (OBA); Opponents On-Base Average (OOBA); Opponents Slugging Average (OSLG); Modified Base-Out Percentage (MBOP) has been adjusted to include wild pitches and balks.
A pitcher’s F12 is the sum of the percentage difference/change value of the twelve statistical categories. The league average performance is 24.000 and a minimum of 0.001. Pitchers recording zero innings pitched will receive a 0.000 F12 Rating. Elite pitchers will accumulate a 30.000+ seasonal rating.
Pitchers completing less than the average yearly innings (i.e. 65.75 in 2011) will have their F12 Rating weighed by the percentage of innings completed in relation to the league average (i.e. Sergio Romo 48 IP/65.75). This adjustment enables starting pitchers and relievers to be compared together based on different workloads for the season.
Factor12 rates yearly performance, with the potential for future projections. Weekly updates will be available during the 2012 season to quantify every pitcher in Major League Baseball using F12.
Sincerely,
Josh Robbins
60ft6in.com
Hi Bryan,
Wondering if you are interested in possilby blogging about the Old Orchard Beach Raging Tide. We are a Collegiate wood bat summer team and part of the Futures League. We are a very low budget team that is showcasing collegiate baseball players from D1, D2, and D3 schools. Most of the players are from Maine and the New England area. If you are interested in coming out to a game and checking us out, or if you are just interested in bringing the family out to a game, let me know and I can get you some tickets. My name is Jason Skinner and I am part owner of the team with the Gallo family. We are the new ownership for this year and looking to continue baseball in OOB for young baseball players to possilby futher their career into MLB.
thanks,
Jason Skinner
Hi,
Great blog. I love baseball blogs. I will check back often. I will gladly trade links with you for more traffic. Here is my link.
betweenthelineshockeyandbaseball.wordpress.com
Thanks, Will
I like your blog. I get MLBTV and watch as many games during the off-season as I do during the regular season. I was rabid Red Sox fan until from the time I six (1969) until 2 years ago when I started watching a lot of out-of-market games. While I’m still a Red Sox fan, I’m more a rabid fan of the sport. I find sabermetrics fascinating. What I really like now is a good game. This is the best time to be a baseball fan, in my opinion.
I know some folks would like to see you expand into other sports, but I don’t know how any one person could do that and maintain a life. Since Junior Seau killed himself, I’ve started to view football as a spectacle of concussions, where the players are as disposable as gladiators, and I’ve stopped watching. While there are concussions in baseball, the scale isn’t comparable. I’m not a crusader or an activist against football, I just don’t want to be a party to it.
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