Final Project Proposal Joshua Abraham Kopin - 1076 Words

Final Project Proposal Joshua Abraham Kopin In the late 19th century, as the rules of the game of baseball were being developed out of a variety of regional forms of bat and ball games, which in turn were developed out of the immigrant games of cricket and rounders. As the game coalesced through the end of the century, one of its pillars, the counting stats like strikes, balls, hits, runs, runs batted in, and were in turn being developed, largely by a English born, reform minded journalist named Henry Chadwick. For Chadwick, every plate appearance was a test of moral rectitude and every hit, run, and run batted in was a measure of the rightness of the player in question. A century and a half later, we have our own version of this way†¦show more content†¦My study proposes to examine the New York Times sports pages between 1997 and 2017 as a way of testing some ideas about the nature of the changes in the discourse about baseball as that discourse has evolved over the last 20 years. Although these ideas did not necess arily take hold in professional baseball circles until the 21st century, outsiders like Bill James have been promoting non-traditional baseball statistics as more accurate ways of describing the game since the 1970s, while in the 1990s Baseball Prospectus, a publication which debuted the PECOTA predictive baseball model developed by eventual data celebrity Nate Silver, began to spread these ideas to increasingly wide groups of baseball fans. Today, these ideas have widespread popularity, and the yearly Bill James Baseball Abstracts and Baseball Prospectus anthologies both have high circulations, while websites like FanGraphs, which approach baseball journalism from a statistical point of view, have significant daily readership (among them, yours truly). As part of a larger project which seeks to argue that the rise of increasingly granular sports statistics help to normalize the cultures of voluntary surveillance that characterize 21st century life in the United States, this analysis will use the New York Times API to sift through 20 years of articles