Primer Chimp

From Wiki Gonzalez

The Primer Chimp is the monkey-like animal in the Baseball Think Factory logo, sitting on a pedestal while holding a baseball and ruminating. The Chimp also appears on official site merchandise like the Baseball Primer thong and letterhead.

The Chimp was also a bot on the old Primer. Its job was to scrape the scoreboard pages of Yahoo or SportsLine for pitching matchups, and automatically create threads for that day's Game Chatter. One of the Chimp's keepers was Chris Dial.

When BBTF went to the registration in 2004, the Chimp suddenly disappeared and Chatters had to be posted manually by the editors. Often this meant a Chatter wouldn't go up until mid-game for some matchups when the editors overslept.

On July 26, 2007, the Chimp made a triumphant return to BBTF by posting that day's Chatter threads, taking the pitching matchups from a Baseball-Reference.com RSS feed. The following announcement was added to the top of the Game Chatter section:

The Primer Chimp has just returned from a relaxing incarceration stay at an undisclosed location. He asks that you be patient with him as gets used to completing the terms of his parole all the new things Jim wants him to do. He apologizes for messing up the pitcher's links on his first day back. Unfortunately, he is a lazy chimp and posted the links contained within bbref.com's RSS without verifying their accuracy. He has fixed the links and promises to pay better attention in the future. He will also ask his buddy, the bbref.com automaton, to change the pitcher links from relative to absolute so The Primer Chimp can get this task done without supervision.

What really happened to the Chimp during his long absence? Some say Meatwad mistook it for a raccoon. Some reports say that the last time the Primer Chimp was seen, he was on his way to Repoz's home for an evening of banana daiquiris and listening to Repoz's massive 45 collection, starting with The Primate 5's (http://www.bigneckrecords.com/p5.HTM) super boss slab o' 45 vinyl "Ape! Ape! Ape!". It's also possible that the Primer Chimp got missplaced among all the obscure references.