Some of us, myself included, are old enough to have enjoyed our sabermetrics indoctrination in real time, starting in the late 70's and early 80's via Bill James' Baseball Abstracts, Pete Palmer's The Hidden Game of Baseball and Craig Wright's The Diamond Appraised. There are a few at this site older than me and they might even recall Earnshaw Cook's obscure Percentage Baseball, written in the 60's (a very interesting read in hindsight, especially considering the timing of when it was written).

When I discovered Rob Neyer in the 90's, I was pleased to see what appeared to be the mainstreaming of a very niche way of looking at baseball. As a researcher for Bill James, he was well armed to start spreading the gospel to the internet generation. And his writing was very good, something you wouldn't necessary guess now given the nature of his link-heavy columns.

For many younger baseball fans -- younger than me anyway -- Rob Neyer was their gateway into the world of sabermetrics. He helped paved the way for likes of the Baseball Prospectus bunch to enjoy a larger audience than they might have 5 or 10 years earlier.

And now, sabermetrics is a language spoken freely and widely, if not always terribly fluently. And Rob Neyer deserves a great deal of credit for his role in all this. I don't know what's next for him and frankly, I'm not sure that he has much new to add to the conversation. I hope he lands somewhere where his writing skills are once again leveraged.

Neyer on the old espnet...wow, it's been a looong time since I started reading him there. In recent years, I've found Neyer has (probably correctly) felt overshadowed when it came to stats-oriented baseball analysis. He was never the mathematician-type who was going to find groundbreaking material those linear weights or 20 years of minor league data, he was the most prominent voice pointing out how dumb some basic stuff everyone took for granted was. Hugely important sabermetrics guy, even if he didn't exactly add any groundbreaking insights of his own. His strength remains in bringing out how important the work of others' is.

On a side note, with new restrictions on monthly bandwidth making their way to Canadian internet (if you don't know what I'm referencing, search for news from the last few days), is there any point to looking into MLB TV? Anyone know how many GB watching 10-15 hours a month of baseball on that service is?

His Sweet Spot blog has been fun to read and I'm glad he's finally out from behind the ESPN Insider walls.

He hasn't been Insider for over 2 years.