Jeff Long of Baseball Prospectus won the fourth annual Greg Spira Award, given to writers under 30 whose pieces on baseball display innovative analysis and reasoning. There have been some pieces that deal with people more than numbers and Long’s BP article sort of dealt with both. he used state of the art programs to compare players of different skill sets and came up with some interesting results. Interesting enough for the $1,000 first prize.
The $200 second prize went to Jon Feyan for his homework. His capstone project for gradual school at Cardinal Stritch University in Wisconsin looked at analytics through eyes of baseball personnel. It is intriguing how that argument has completely turned around from a decade ago from maverick outcasts when Moneyball first came out to the way business is done.
In between doing his high school homework, 18-year-old Ben Diamond looked at the success rate of shoulder surgery for pitchers. It is not the slam dunk experts would have you believe. Remember Johan Santana? Diamond got $100 for his third-place entry. Here is the release with links to all the three winning entries.
Great job not just writing these pieces, but getting the pieces in for the Greg Spira Award, named after a good friend and a great Mets fan who died too young from kidney disease. We worked together on the Maple Street Press Mets Annual for four years and I’ve been judging this for four years without him. He would have turned 49 this week and he would have loved seeing the Mets finally sticking to a plan.
And if you knew Greg or know someone going through the pain of losing a sibling, Greg’s brother Jonathan just came out with a book on the subject of dealing with the death of a loved one.