The UD hosting lockout is broken

So I’m back. For those of you familiar with my house at The University of Dayton, I’m sure you can figure out where the title of this page came from. For the rest of you, Stonemill was the street I lived on senior year in college. This street, therefore, contained the room in which I came up with a lot of the ideas I’m going to put forth in the following days, months, and potentially even years. No less importantly, it provided, in the form of the residents of both sides of my duplex, many of the people with whom I watched, played, and argued about sports with throughout college. Which is important because they both helped me refine these ideas, because they helped me continue to enjoy sports so much, and because they cared enough to make fun of the Bills, Orioles and Jayhawks constantly. Actually, I hate you all.

Also, when I discussed things that are not related to sports, the people on Stonemill helped me with that too. In the non-sports vein, I intend to write about anything I find entertaining and worth sharing. This could mean movies, music, books, or anything else that you already know I like to talk about. For instance, in honor of Book 7 coming out in July, I am currently at work on “Superior Works of Fantasy to Harry Potter.”

Anyhow, some of you will probably be disappointed to learn that not a whole lot of these features will be about baseball. This is because one of my favorite things about sports are the statistics.

I know this is a counterintuitive thing to say, because baseball is obviously flooded with numbers. However, what I like about statistics is combining them into new and interesting ways to answer questions about the reality behind the raw data. In baseball, most of this work has already been done, and the level of sophistication and time required to improve the state of affairs is too costly for me. In other areas, such as basketball and football, the work is not quite so far along. Currently, basketball is my greatest area of interest.

This is not to say that I will never write about baseball, and it is also not to say that I will only write in relation to statistics. But, since they do color my thinking so heavily, some quantitative analysis will almost always be present, at least in the background.

I hope you enjoy my site. If so (or if not), please feel more than welcome to comment and let me know what you think.