Finding people to interview is proving a bit more difficult that I had anticipated. Mostly because, I’m in cold calling mode where I just email people that I know and ask them if they want to be interviewed and then ask them if they know anyone who might be interested in interviewing. I have about five interviews scheduled. The problem is that most of the people that I have scheduled are part of the key informants group. Most of the interviews that I want to do will be the rank and file sabermetricians, people who do not do sabermetrics for a living. I have two interviews scheduled. I don’t think I can reveal their names as I’m pretty sure that violates the confidentiality part of the human subjects research protocol described in the last post.

Anyway, I have decided that I need to turn my attention to places outside of SABR for interview subjects. I just got through posting to a bunch online bulletin boards and chat rooms. This was a pretty tedious process as all of the bulletin boards required registration. Anyways, I wanted to post the places where I have solicited people for interviews. If you are interested in seeing exactly what I wrote for the solicitation, click on the links below. Mine is the post entitled, “Sabermetricians needed for academic research.”

SABR – Baseball Chat Forum, Socio-Economics Forum, and Research Requests Forum: I’m really not sure how good any of the SABR forums are going to be for solicitation purposes, as it looks like most of them are rarely used by SABR members, but since I’m going to the convention and all, I figured that this would be the best place to start. It’s a shame that people don’t use this forum more often, because I imagine that the Socio-Economics forum would be quite interesting. Anyways, I also sent an email out to the SABR statistics section emailing list.

Baseball Think Factory – Announcements Forum: This is one of the major sabermetric websites and I’m a little more hopeful that someone will see my request. Actually I just checked and at least four people have at least looked at the post, so hopefully, I’ll get some people this way.

Fanhome.com – Strategy and Sabermetrics Forum: This is a general sports fan bulletin board that seems to be fairly active. I’ve actually never seen this myself until I googled sabermetrics forum so I have no idea how useful this one is. The last post was a week ago, but that was better than most of the SABR forums where I was usually the first post in over a year. I find it interesting that they lump “strategy” and “sabermetrics” in the same category since I think most Sabermetricians would argue that most MLB baseball managers probably don’t use sabermetrics properly in their own in-game strategy.

Baseball Fever – Statistics, Analysis, and Sabermetrics Forum: Another general baseball fan site that seems to be very active. Lots of post in the past week, so again, I’m hopeful that I’ll get at least a few hits from here.

I’m a little unsure how this is going to work out. I’m really not much of a online forum poster. I’m more of a blog commenter. What I’m most worried about it is that people will see that I have not been a member of a particular bulletin board for very long and will dismiss me because I’m a noob, or even worse, a spammer.

I’ve been considering trying to post on some team specific forums, such as Sons of Sam Horn, but I think those people might be even more territorial about their bulletin board and might not be so welcoming of an egghead trying to do research on them. But I guess we’ll see how this cattle call goes and if worse comes to worst, I will have to go undercover as a Red Sox fan.

UPDATE: Holy cow, I just got an email from someone who wants to be interviewed! WooHoo!  These internets are awesome!