Really, the Saber Library should never have existed. It took way too much time to create, cost me out-of-pocket money, was tedious as hell, had no tangible reward, and took away time from what I really should have been doing: finding a job. It was a project that most people in their right minds would never contemplate doing. Thankfully, though, I’m stupid.
When combined with large doses of boredom and time, stupidity can be a dangerous thing: a perfect storm for mayhem. In the ninth grade, my best friend experienced a particularly brutal convergence of these three things in bio lab one day, and stuck tweezers in the electrical socket to “…see what would happen”. Sparky eventually escaped his legacy by doing something even more stupid (breaking his leg during a chess match), but so far, I haven’t been so lucky. Instead, I got to re-edit this entire thing for all you here at FanGraphs. Am I a sucker or what?
Thankfully, though, there are lots of smart people out there doing smart things that’s I’ve been able to steal from. Bradley Woodrum’s introduction to sabermetrics videos? Swipe! Graham MacAree’s incredible Saber 101 series? Stolen. Visuals from Justin Bopp at Beyond the Boxscore? Really, this is all too easy. Everyone’s been very gracious and willing to share, which has turned this site into a regular hodgepodge of smart things contributed by smart people. Trust me, I’m just as surprised as everyone else.
The Saber Library is now almost a year old and it’s here at FanGraphs to stay. I’ll be updating pages as FanGraphs changes, adding new statistics while changing the information on old ones, and I hope to make this a living, breathing resource. Consider it your Hitchhiker’s Guide to navigating the universe of sabermetrics (see what I did there?). While the math may be confusing and the Book Blog may give you a headache, this site is here to tell you “DON’T PANIC!” Things are not as complicated as they seem, and you don’t need to understand multivariable calculus to understand sabermetrics.
In the Library, you’ll find individual pages for nearly every statistic housed here at FanGraphs, along with a selection of primers on important sabermetrics concepts. We’ll also be using this space as a separate blog on FanGraphs (á la NotGraphs and RotoGraphs) and we’ll be writing articles geared toward helping people understand statistics. This space will (likely) not be updated as often as the other FanGraphs blogs, but we’ll see how this space develops.
And so, enjoy! Tour through the Library, learn something new, and whatever you do, keep those tweezers in your medicine cabinet.