I don’t have much to report.  The interviewing process is frustrating as always, but I shall persevere.  I’m actually in Texas right now, visiting my mom for mother’s day, but I thought I would post a link to an essay that I wrote on my personal blog.  I wrote a brief piece giving my two cents on the recent appearance of HG Bissinger, Will Lietch, and Braylon Edwards on Costas Now.  I do think it is very related to what I’m doing here, in the fact that I think the same spirit of discontent with the institution has found itself both in blogs and the sabemetric movement.  In other words, blogs and sabermetrics in its current form are both a reaction to something.  And that something is a failure by an institution to provide the people who interact with the consumer with something that is useful for them.  In any case, I’ll be back next week with a better progress report, but I figured I spent a great deal of time working on the essay so that should count for something.

There are lots of reasons that I can give as to why this blog isn’t going as well as I hoped. But I’m just going to give you a couple of them and tell you how I am going to address them. I’m doing this because I sincerely want to do a better job of keeping myself and other people updated on how things are going on and I’ve done a poor job of that. This is so because:

1) I’m going through some personal stuff. I’m a bit torn about writing about this because it sounds like a lame excuse. But at the same time, to not write about it would be dishonest. I’m having a lot of trouble being motivated these days. I haven’t met with my advisor all quarter and I’ve written very little. There are some days when I literally just stare at my computer screen unable to get myself to type a word. Am I having a breakdown? Maybe. But I’ve heard from several people that this is a normal part of the dissertation writing process. But like I said, I’m going through some personal stuff that is unrelated to my dissertation that has distracted me quite a bit. I’m working on getting a handle on these issues, and I’ve had some degree of success in the past few weeks, but I still am not where I want to be from a personal standpoint. Again, to stress, I don’t want to make excuses, because I fully accept responsibility for not making the kind of progress that I would have like to have made this quarter, but if this is to serve as a journal that details the kinds of issues that affect one’s personal research, well, this is an issue that has contributed much to the current state of affairs. On the plus side, I haven’t had a smoke in over a month.

2) I actually take this blog too seriously. Whenever I write something for this blog, I want to provide informative links and neat-o references and new documents that I have produced. Any blogger knows that this is actually a pain in the ass and can sometimes take up quite a bit of time. And because of my general anxiety about finishing my work, I avoid blogging regularly. I know, it’s a vicious cycle, one that I’m determined to break. So what I think I’m going to do is announce publicly, that I’m going to dedicate Monday mornings, from 10AM to 11AM to writing an entry. Even if the entry is as short as “I didn’t do a damn thing this week” I’m going to do it. I’m not going to make any effort to put stuff in like external links and references. I’m just going to write dammit. Maybe I can shame myself into working harder on this thing.

OK, I feel better now that I’ve gotten this off my chest. Hopefully, this is the start of the real work of my dissertation.  OK, now I’m going to write a post about the interviews I’ve done over the last two weeks.

Greetings. I must start this post with an apology. I have very obviously not been able to use this blog as a motivation tool for myself, and I haven’t been able to update you on the progress of my dissertation project as well as tell you about other related developments. If it makes you feel any better, I’ve been neglecting my personal blog as well. That doesn’t make you feel any better does it? Didn’t think so. I guess I should just stop dwelling on it and start by updating you on where I am in the data collection process.

By this time, I have completed about 24 interviews. I did about 12 interviews at the SABR conference, and the rest of the interviews have been done over the phone, with my most recent one being last Saturday. They have been all with what I’m calling the “rank and file” of the sabermetrics movement meaning that they are just regular people who aren’t necessarily involved with any professional sports franchises or what I’ve been referring to as the baseball institution. All of them have been very interesting and great conversations to have. They’ve ranged from age 17 to 78. They’re all males, and they’re pretty much all white. I’ll be scouring the world for a female sabermetrician, as well as one of color soon enough, so if anyone can refer one to me, that’d be great.

The next phase of my data collection revolves around doing interviews with “key informants”, those people who are plugged into the baseball institution and can speak directly to the way that the knowledge has made its way through the system. The kinds of people I’m looking for here are statisticians who actually work for baseball franchises, front office baseball people, and sports journalists. I really need to get my ass in gear and start contacting these people because if I don’t have the data collected by Christmas, I think I’m going to shoot myself.

I’ve been pretty bad about transcribing the interviews. This is bad for two reasons. One, I should be listening to the interviews as soon as possible after doing them so that I can recall the most detail about the conversation when transcribing. Second, it’s bad because I haven’t really listened to them so that I can start to really begin to outline the research. I have some ideas of what I’m going to do, but those ideas would be much better fleshed out if I had been transcribing this whole time. In any case, I’ve decided to dedicate all of my time at my second job as a computer lab desk attendant to transcribing. My colleague, the great MG, says that I just need to put the blinders on and get into the habit of doing it before it is too late.

We also discussed the need to spell out specific tasks that need to be done to advance the dissertation, so the first order of business for me (besides transcribing) is to write a blog entry tomorrow about two players around which I want to possibly organize two of my chapters.

So again, my sincerest apologies, and please check back tomorrow for some of the things I’ve learned about Joe Morgan and Barry Bonds.

In case you can’t tell, the view from my hotel room includes the big arch.

Sorry that I haven’t been updating much, but to be honest, not much has been going on. I’ve interviewed a few more people over the phone, but I’m now here in St. Louis for the big conference. I just got into the hotel room after missing my first flight this morning. This post is going to be a quickie, as I need to go check in at the conference and then start pressing flesh to try and get some interviews scheduled. Anyways, I’m going to try to write a post at least once a day while I’m here to keep you posted on what’s happening from both the dissertation point of view, and from a more personal travel log point of view. It’s been a while since I’ve traveled by myself and I’ve never been to St. Louis before, so hopefully I’ll get to explore the city a little bit. And as I’ve mentioned before, I do want to capture some of the more personal moments of the dissertation process and I think this is a perfect example of something that is a little bit personal but still interesting for posterity’s sake. Anyways, I need to get going, but expect frequent updates about my experiences from the conference in the next three days.

Apologies for not posting more. It has been a busy few weeks as the end of the quarter has come and I have spent some time taking it easy while transitioning to a new schedule. This post is just an update of how things are shaping up for the summer.

The first thing you should know is that I have started a job at UCSB’s Institutional Research department. I will be working part time doing some survey analysis work. In particular, I will be working on a project about the factors involved in the retention of freshman students. There’s a possibility that this could lead to a full time gig in the future, but more importantly it gives me a way to keep my quantitative skills sharp, so that when I go look for a job I can point to my work at institutional research as proof that I can crunch numbers.

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