This site is a labor of love project run by Chris St. John–also known as @stealofhome in some areas on the internet–to the baseball community (with the technical assistance of an agent named Claude).
My journey into baseball analysis started in 2010 after stumbling on a faily new website called Fangraphs. I then read Tom Tango, Mitchel Lichtman, and Andrew Dolphin’s The Book and started to get more involved with the internet sabermetrics crowd on Twitter. I eventually started writing articles myself, beginning on Blogspot and transferring to Wordpress.
In 2011, R.J. Anderson and Tommy Rancel were running a Tampa Bay Rays blog called The Process Report and took the first gamble on me. A month later, Justin Bopp brought me on at Beyond the Boxscore after reading a community post, Full on Double Wildcard–still one of my favorite titles–and getting to know me through the now-defunct baseball MMORPG 2 Out Rally. Bopp also brought me on at MLB Daily Dish, allowing me to expand my writing skills into a more journalistic style.
One month after that, David Pease approached me about working at Baseball Prospectus, an offer a baseball writer can’t refuse. My time there was short-lived, mostly because my life priorities were changing at that point. However, in that short period and only nine months after my first attempt at baseball writing, I was able to get published on ESPN.com, definitely a highlight in my “career.” A month after that, I achieved my 15 minutes of international fame by calling out the White Sox as the accusatory team in the “Man in White” incident.
I spent most of that year writing odds and ends on my personal blog, reappearing in February 2012 at the Platoon Advantage, thanks to the invitation of Bill Parker and Michael Bates. Finally, Bryan Grosnick asked me back to Beyond the Boxscore in 2013 and that’s where I stayed until 2015, when I decided to put my writing career on hold.
My final hurrah was a chapter titled “Not All Fly Balls Are Created Equal” in the 2015 edition of The Hardball Times Baseball Annual, introducing the concept of expected run value of a batted ball based on distance, spray angle, and hang time data gathered by Inside Edge.
Nearly a decade later, I joined an incredible Brewers community called Brewer Fanatic and have been using their platform to share my thoughts on the game as time allows.
Any questions, comments, or concerns about this site can be directed to me at stealofhome@prospectwavelength.com.