Don Malcolm

From Wiki Gonzalez

Don Malcolm is sometimes called "the Hunter S. Thompson of baseball analysis."

From the 1990s till 2001, Don Malcolm co-wrote and published an annual, the Big Bad Baseball Annual, that he promoted as the successor to the Baseball Abstracts of Bill James. BTF co-founders Sean Forman and Jim Furtado, along with a gang of others, contributed sabermetric studies to the BBBA from time to time. It followed the style of James's books, mixing serious studies, player capsules, team summaries, and goofy articles, and was oftentimes as sloppily edited as James's work.

From 1996 on, Don railed against "neo-sabermetrics" as he perceived it was being peddled by the Baseball Prospectus, his project's direct competitor. By neo-sabermetrics, he seemed to mean a perversion of sabermetrics to make money off proprietary formulas and re-hashing James's discoveries, rather than advancing the state of the art with research open to the public.

For a brief period in 2001, Don was a prime contributor to Baseball Think Factory. BTF lists him as still contributing articles as recently as the 2004 season; in fact, he wrote a half-dozen articles for BTF in 2004, and a Red Sox season preview (http://www.baseballthinkfactory.org/files/main/article/boston_red_sox_preview05/) so far in 2005.

Don lives in the San Francisco area, works for the U.S. Postal Service, and is a film noir buff. He continued publishing new material on his own site (BigBadBaseball.com) which ran on the old Primer software, but the site has been down for a while. In 2005 he created a new blog to house his studies.

See also: Feud with Baseball Prospectus

External Links

• BigBadBaseball.com from Wayback Archive (http://web.archive.org/web/%2A/http%3A//www.bigbadbaseball.com/)
• 2randomforchance (http://2random4chance.com/blog/) - Don's current blog (credit to Jeff Angus for the find)