Aaron once kindly wrote about me:

Once upon a time Ubelmann was just another guy who hung out in the comments section here, but then he started to contribute to Stick and Ball Guy's site and quickly became one of my favorite Twins bloggers. If you're not yet familiar with the best Twins blogger who doesn't actually have his own blog, here's your chance.

Well, before I was just another guy who hung out in the comments section there, I was just another guy who hung out at TwinkieTown, until Jesse kindly gave me front page privileges over there. (And I can't thank him enough for that.) Before that, I was just another guy who hung out at the Twins Geek's now defunct community site (was it called Twins Territory? Man time flies.) Before that, I was just another guy who discovered baseball blogs through TG's fleeting presence with the Star Tribune.* Before that, I was just another guy who read a lot of Rob Neyer on espn.com. And way back in high school I was just another guy who decided to do his senior science fair project on the topic of which baseball statistics correlate most closely with winning.**

*It used to really irritate me when people would complain about his Timberwolves posts simply because they felt that "the Twins Geek" should write exclusively about the Twins. One of the best things about the WGOM is that I could always post something completely out of left field and no one will complain that I should be writing about something else. Or I could post something with statistics in it and no one would tell me that you can't learn anything about baseball from statistics. One thing is for sure--I would never leave here to write for a different Twins blog.

**Okay, maybe there weren't too many people who did that one. But I'll tell you this much--if you want to go places in science fair, do a project in the math category. In my experience, judges will give you the benefit of the doubt at every turn if you do a math project. I felt that was by far my worst science fair project (though looking around at some of the stuff that passed as "statistics" for other projects, I guess I can see why it looked good by comparison), but I made it as alternate to the international science fair that year. Of course, with my luck, ISEF happened to be in Detroit that year, but I guess you don't need an exotic locale to trash hotel rooms like rock stars and awkwardly flirt with science gurls like nerdy science fair dudes.

More recently, I have Terry Ryan and his acquisition of Tony Batista for introducing me to the WGOM. Over at TwinkieTown, I was claiming that Batista could be as good or a little better than Cuddyer at third base, because even if Batista was crap at the plate, Cuddyer was a below average defender and most statistics had Batista as a slightly above average third baseman before he left for Japan. Then SBG tried to correct my math in a post over here, and when I saw it, I had no choice but to show him how he managed to mangle the math. Of course, while I might have gotten the math right on that, we know that I got the baseball all wrong.*

*The only solace that I take from that episode is that, while I drastically misjudged Batista's glove during the offseason, Nick Punto basically showed that the team could do pretty well with a decent-glove, not-much-bat guy at the hot corner in order to move Cuddyer and his deaf ear into right field.

Eventually, I decided that SBG was a pretty good guy and that it was fun to discuss baseball over here with him and his ragtag crew. That '06 team was some kind of crazy drug for me--they got me high and I couldn't get enough. I commented like crazy and eventually started posting some on the front page. Then thanks to BabySBG, I started posting a lot more while SBG had more important things to tend to.

Sometime between now and then, things got a little carried away. In retrospect, I think that it was a bad idea for me to take so many of the game logs. I certainly enjoyed them at the time, but it was like starting a baseball conversation every day that I couldn't help but get sucked into. With unlimited time on my hands, I might still be going strong with them. But ultimately, I wound up sacrificing too much (mainly time I should have been spending doing research*) in order to post and participate in the gamelogs.

*Stupidly, I had a bit of a mini-revelation watching Scrubs with my roommates a few weeks ago. Dr. Cox was giving Elliot a hard time for selling out by switching to private practice. To him, private practice doctors were more interested in clocking out at 5pm than they were in healing their patients. I have no idea how much that actually applies to private practice doctors, but I did realize that when I started grad school, I was at school until the physics got done--whether that was 7pm or 7am the next morning. But lately, I was looking for any excuse I could find to get home by 4 or 5pm so that I could catch the Twins game live because (insert some minute detail here) was important for me to see for myself. And no matter what I told myself, I wouldn't be doing work after the game--I would wind up chatting about the game or writing another post.

Then it hit me that I don't really want things to be that way. It's clear right now that I don't want to do physics forever, but I owe my advisor a lot more effort than I've given him. I feel a bit like Justin Morneau hitting .237/.296/.461 going into Seattle in 2006. My team has expected more of me, and while I still show signs of productivity, I'm not putting in enough effort and I'm walking back to the dugout empty-handed way too often. Do I have an MVP season in me? Maybe in the sense that I wouldn't really deserve it like Morneau didn't really deserve that MVP and I would only be earning the accollades if people were willing to overlook significant flaws in my game. But I can do a hell of a lot better than I am right now, and I think it would make me happier just to know that at some point I buckled down and gave physics all I had.

Plus, I feel increasingly miscast as a "beat writer." The sorts of insights that I have aren't things that change on a daily basis. Eventually, I felt it was pretty predictable what I was going to write each day. Pitcher X has a low ERA, but don't let that fool you, he's much worse--see exhibit A, B, C. Pitchers Y and Z have very similar value but have different styles--see exhibit D, E, F.

SBG tried to talk me out of this by offering me a chance to write once a week or even on an irregular basis, but at this point, I even lack the motivation to do that. The Twins are locked in a pennant race and they ought to be an interesting team*, but they are coming to Seattle on Monday, and I haven't made any kind of effort to get tickets. In this last week, even though they're finally in my time zone, I haven't really even bothered to watch the games and I've barely been interested enough to check the scores at the end of the day. There are probably a number of reasons for this, but going into them might double the length of this already-mammoth post.

*I must say that I've been a bit disappointed by analysis--mine included--of this team. The Twins are something like 8 or 9 wins above where they should be given their hits, walks, pitching peripherals, strength of schedule, etc. So by that way of looking at things, they are about a .500 team, and before the season I expected them to be about a 73-win team. They've had good health overall, especially from Mauer and Morneau, so moving them from 73-74 wins to 81-82 wins isn't such a huge stretch. But even the traditional baseball guys (see here, for example) are having trouble figuring out how this team is managing to win games. Under Gardy, the Twins have seemingly outperformed their pythag a lot, but I'm hesitant to put the bulk of that on Gardy. He probably deserves some of the credit, but part of me wonders if we might be looking at a story similar to that of the Phillips Curve. In baseball, analysts looked at the statistics, found some correlations to winning, and some teams adjusted their statistics to fall in line more with those statistics. But the original statistics were based on the underlying assumption that teams were putting players on the field with scouting and traditional stats as their primary guides. But now that guy with a .380 OBP on the Blue Jays might be a little less likely to have the speed that a guy with a .380 OBP in the past might have had, so maybe he doesn't make it around the bases as often, and maybe he doesn't make as many plays in the field, so maybe it makes a little less sense today to take peripherals and translate them into wins the same way for a team like the Blue Jays and a team like the Twins. And if you look at the two AL teams who are most outperforming their third-order wins, you're looking at the Twins and the Angels--and you'd be hard-pressed to find two teams that rely more on old-school scouting methods when they evaluate their players. Which might make scouting the new Moneyball, or something like that.

Maybe this team's performance is more sustainable than I might otherwise suspect, but even at that, my hunch is a long way from really providing much evidence that that is the case. You might be able to get an idea by looking to see if there's any relationship between speed scores and teams overperforming their pythag record. Or finding some other way to categorize "old school" and "new school" teams, then see if pythag records apply equally well to both categories. At this point in the season, the best evidence is probably the observation that at about this point of the season, a team's actual record begins to be a better predictor of its future performance than its pythag record, but even that explanation is kind of unsatisfying in that it doesn't provide us with a good reason as to why the Twins are outperforming their pythag.

I think back at how I used to spend my baseball time, and I used to spend a lot more time thinking and crunching numbers and a lot less time shooting the shit. Certainly some of that number crunching, especially early on, was looking for patterns that I likely had too little data to justify. But I felt like I was learning. I don't feel like I'm learning as much these days, and I feel like I spend so much time writing that I don't have much time to seek out and read the state of the art in sabermetrics. I don't want to wake up one day and realize that I'm needlessly clinging to outdated stats, and that's kind of where I feel like I'm headed.*

*Don't get me wrong here--I don't mean to suggest that it's not worth following baseball if you don't keep up to date on the latest stats. With the all of the atrocious announcing that I've found in the Olympic coverage so far, I've been thinking a lot about sports announcing. Specifically, we don't need it. People loved sports before the three-man booth and now they love sports sometimes in spite of the three-man booth. Sometimes the way that sports are covered just seems completely insane. No one would voluntarily decide to watch The Dark Knight on first viewing with Ebert telling us scene-by-scene whether or not the director was doing a good job. And no one would want to watch a movie where a voiceover described to us each object that appeared on the camera--it would be extremely tedious. Yes, I can see the beautiful mountains in the mist, you don't need to tell me that the mountains are looking beautiful today, I CAN SEE THAT. Yet that's exactly what most sports broadcasting is right now. One guy can't help but narrate everything that the camera points to. "Hey look, it's an American flag on a pole, waving in the breeze." Then the other guy can't help but have an opinion or a story about it. "That reminds me, John, no one makes flags like Betsy Ross did. No, sir. Back in her day, she started the flag and she finished it. None of this using machines to speed up the process business. If we insisted that all flags be handmade, we would be much better off today than we are right now." I like an interesting observation as much as the next guy, but most of the things the play-by-play guy says are obvious, most of the things the analyst says he's repeated a thousand times before, and most of the questions the interviewer asks are statements.

Anyway, there's a lot about sports coverage that we get and that you don't need to be a perfectly happy fan. Personally, I'm interested in the stats because I'm a very quantitative person and I really want to know how far the numbers can go towards describing the players on the field so that I can know when I'm watching something special or when I should expect that a player has really outdone himself and when he has underperformed or how I should distribute credit for a team's success. So when I say that I don't want to use outdated stats, that's a personal stance, and not something I would expect to be universal. If you're having a good time as a fan, more power to you.

It's almost 4am, and I need to wrap this thing up. If the length of this post is any indication, I still have some blogging left in me. I don't know that I'm going to get back to the grind any time soon, but when I come back, wearin' the 45, I'll have some more life experiences under my belt, a better idea of how to pace myself, and the drive to finish some of the stats projects I've been meaning to get around to for two years or more.

I don't have a really good excuse like raising a child, but there are a number of things I'll be working on while I'm gone. In no particular order, I need to work on being a better son, a better friend, a better roommate, a better student, a better teacher, a better programmer, a more caring person, a more attractive person, a better cook, a better reader, a better writer, etc., etc., etc.

There are so many people to thank here that I'm not going to be able to name you all. If you're reading this, then I'm sure I'm indebted to you in one way or another. I thought about trying to list all of the things I've learned from being around here, but that post would take me many hours to write and would certainly be incomplete.

So thanks for having me, SBG, thanks for your many kinds words to everyone who commented on SBG's announcement of my hiatus, and thanks to everyone for putting up with me and teaching me a great many things. I hope to get things straightened out eventually, and if there's a next time, I hope you'll all still be around, and I know that the community here will thrive as long as there's baseball to be played, with or without me.