One of the great things about being part of BP or A-B is the internal email list. Imagine being part of some of the smartest, timely baseball discussion. I'm lucky enough to get both and oddly, there's not much overlap in topic or tone. Ken Arneson sent an email today asking about a blog post on the BALCO leaks and it got me thinking enough to put together three disparate loose threads I've had in my head since the middle of last week.

The BALCO leaks, to me, are very odd. I disagree with them, but when I was given the opportunity to read some of the leaked transcripts, I jumped at it. Yes, it's hypocritical, but this journalism education I recieve seems to be filled with that. I wonder, had I taken journalism classes in college, would it have taught me the things I needed to succeed and deal with the dilemmas I've faced in my writing 'career'? I've learned from mistakes, avoiding some and stepping in big ones.

After the Rose story in 2003, I've learned not to take people at their word, to get the documentation in hand. I did that with the BALCO leaks out of reaction, rather than thinking about whether or not I agreed with this person leaking the information. Things like this, the near-daily ethical dilemmas about what information I should have and what information I should pass on is the hardest part about my job. I've had both sides of a trade call me asking for my opinion - am I bound to disclose this to the other party? I've had teams ask me not to print something or delay it - and I've done this - but is that some mild betrayal of my readership?

What's saved me is having a group to bounce things off and in the case of BP, an editor to catch my most egregious errors. Still, its a constant challenge to "get things right." For me, most of my work is based on my ability to get people to respond to phone calls, emails, and other communication. I translate that information into a readable format, filtering things for the readers. Call me a noise filter, if you will. If I'm wrong about my filtering, my readers will cease being readers pretty quickly. If I can't get people to talk to me, my information quality will drop and once again, fickle readers will move on.
Which brings me to the discussion of Alan Schwarz's Scouts/Stats roundtable. The article, a masterpiece of post-Moneyball positioning, is a must-read classic. The idea that uber-scouts like Gary Hughes and Eddie Bane would sit down with Gary Huckabay and Voros McCracken speaks to the status of Alan Schwarz and the distance that the stat side has travelled in the last ... well, I always want to say ten or twenty years, when Schwarz's great book The Numbers Game disproves that, but I'll say ten and let me tell you why later.

Still, it's a great read, even for non-baseball fans, proving that Moneyball was only tangentially a baseball book. (And my third favorite Michael Lewis book.) The discussion, especially at the few points where both sides either come together on something or at least openly open their minds to the other side are beautiful. Huckabay's car analogy will rank up there with "beer or tacos" in the sabermetric metaphor pantheon.

For me, this was more about access and putting things together. Alan Schwarz occupies an interesting space, giving him the opportunity to put things together that no one else in baseball either can do or would even think of doing. Luckily for everyone, Alan is among the sharpest of men, most interesting of thinkers, and uses his position to expand all of our thought processes.

There was also someone else in the room, a fly-on-the-wall as far as I know, and a name better known than any of the named participants. I'm unsure what this "fly" thought about the discussion or whether they participated at all, but it speaks again to access. One of the key points of division across the "stat" landscape is the transition from "outsider" to "insider" and what compromises that forces.

David Cameron, in a piece on USS Mariner, called out several leading lights of the stat community for lack of interpersonal skills. I've met David and like him and his work, but I don't think he was right. He wasn't wrong, but he made the problem personal rather than structural. His own inherent biases colored the way he viewed the problem. It's not that these people do or do not lack people skills - and since I've at least met each of them, I'll disagree with all and disagree strongly with his assessment of some - it's that the landscape is changing so rapidly that not everyone has the same solution to the problem and even when they do, they're not at the same place.

For decades, going back to Bill James, no one listened to the voice in the wilderness. James wrote his Abstracts and people read them, increasing the understanding of the stat side and filtering upwards to the teams themselves. I don't know how long it took from his first Abstract to the time that a team first contacted him, but I'm guessing it was longer for him than it was for BP or for a guy sending out a newsletter by email.

I know how long it was for me. My emailed version of UTK had under a hundred subscribers and was less than a month old when I got my first email from a team official. It was a correction, but it still gave me quite a shock that anyone was reading my stuff at that level. My pal Kevin Goldstein, now at Baseball America but like me, started his Prospect Report as an emailed newsletter, got access into front offices even more quickly than I did.

I don't pretend to have the same contacts or credibility as Peter Gammons, Jayson Stark, Tim Kurkjian, or Ken Rosenthal. These four guys are among the best in their profession and surprisingly the nicest guys. I've had more occasion to talk with Stark more than the others, a function of bumping into him more, and he's never been less than gracious with his time, even when we disagreed or even competed on a story. When the Rose story broke, both Gammons and Stark were polite when disagreeing with me. Gammons said something like "I know Will Carroll and I trust him, but he's wrong." He certainly didn't have to say that.

What I do have is a percentage, a measure of those contacts and credibility. It allows me to do what I do and without those, I'm done. Others on the "stats side" - and I use this term reluctantly tho repeatedly - have credibility, but often not contacts. The developed outsider perspective has its positives and negatives. There's no need to pull punches, knowing that he won't have to call that front office the next day, giving him far more intellectual freedom, but that freedom costs information. There are things that are known or unknown that the outsider perspective will miss, just as being too close to a situation and, as Lewis puts it, "trusting your lying eyes" will cause a skewed perspective.

Esteban Loaiza had a great 2003, coming out of nowhere to be one of the best pitchers in the league. Outsiders pointed to his new pitch, a cutter, that he finally perfected. Insiders knew that he was done with a messy divorce and other personal problems that had plagued him. Knowing both going into 2003 would have been a significant advantage, but it was worth nothing going into 2004, when Loaiza returned to his previous levels. Both were equally right and wrong, but the opportunity to interpret more information might have helped in both cases.

As Schwarz's roundtable showed, the insiders and outsiders are coming together. There were as many front office people that were stats oriented as there were "old school" guys at the Winter Meetings this year. There's a middle ground, a land of beer and tacos, where the truth lies, informed by both sides. But we're shortshrifting this if we think there is only two sides to information. There's millions, probably things we haven't thought of. UTK showed that there's a market for medical information. I'd love to see other new angles on baseball information, such as psychology or genetics.

Finally, there's one thing that always sticks in my craw a bit. Outsiders are accused of being "attack dogs" or "basement living geeks." There's some truth there, but it's overplayed now. Just as scouts aren't all fat tobacco-spitters, stats guys aren't all pasty and pale. Worse, the attacks on many of us tend to be personal. I can't imagine how Gammons deals with it but his skin must be insanely thick. It still bothers me when someone calls me an asshole or denigrates my work. If I'm such an asshole, why do people continue taking my calls?

Can't we all just get along?