Jim Furtado

From Wiki Gonzalez

Jim's the guy who actually runs and pays for Baseball Think Factory. Even the most avowed atheists among Primates consider him our god.

Prior to the Think Factory, he contributed to the Big Bad Baseball Annual edited by Don Malcolm. He debuted as a writer for the BBBA in 1999. The year before, BBBA had criticized shortcomings in Bill James's Runs Created method, and they felt they needed an improved method of their own for the '99 BBBA. At the same time, Furtado had been tooling around with a run estimator stat of his own called XR/XW (Extrapolated Runs/Extrapolated Wins). It was just the sort of thing they were looking for, and he joined Malcolm and his crew, which included Sean Forman, Tom Ruane, Ron Johnson, Brock Hanke, and others. (Mike Emeigh wrote for it as well, but it's not known if he predated Furtado or if he just showed up in 2000.)

After debuting as a contributor in 1999's BBBA, Furtado became co-editor of the 2000 edition along with Malcolm, Hanke, and Forman. The BBBA's reputation as books were mixed. The annuals had good research, but were shoddily put together, full of obvious typos, excessive snark at other stathead organizations (most notably Baseball Prospectus), and too many inside jokes.

After the 2000 edition, Furtado and Forman broke off from BBBA, disappointed with its continued shortcomings. They founded the Think Factory in early 2001. Originally, part of it was a website called baseballprimer.com which linked to various news stories. Another part was Sean Forman's Baseball-reference.com. In 2004, Furtado and Forman - by mutual agreement - terminated their partnership because their endeavors were increasingly different. Furtado kept the name "Baseball Think Factory."