About the Author:
I have a long-term obsession with sport, including many years going to absurd lengths to watch it and write about it. I’m now a professional data scientist after spending most of a decade getting a PhD in Astrophysics. Mostly this means I have spent ten years getting progressively more annoyed at baseball people who think they understand data and data analysis, but don’t.
About the blog:
This blog is part continuation, part successor to The Forward Defensive. The name is changed for two reasons. Firstly and most importantly because I accidentally let the domain name registration lapse. But also because Defensive Indifference is going to be meaningfully different in many ways from The Forward Defensive. It will still feature opinions about various sports. But there is going to be more of a focus on deep analytical dives using the tools and expertise that come with almost a decade of doing professional research. In practice, this also means more of a focus on baseball than previously. The data collection is a lot more thorough and organised in baseball and the records are easier to access. (Also, although both sports have inexplicably become harder to watch in the modern media landscape, cricket more so because I have less flexibility to deal with the time zones involved now.)
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Defensive Indifference 
How does someone who enjoys the subtle skills and psychology of cricket and the exuberance of football get to like rounders? sorry baseball.
I know Woody Allen once said Baseball doesn’t mean anything, it’s just beautiful but compared to cricket it’s actually pretty plain.
Enjoyed your comments and added your site to my favourites.
Hope you have underestimated Warwickshire’s chances though I don’t think you have somehow.
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Thanks! A big reason why I like baseball is that I grew up with it. It is the preferred sport of my family and consequently I’ve watched it all my life. It’s not nearly as subtle and interesting as cricket (the best analogy I ever heard was that cricket is to baseball as chess is to draughts), but it isn’t as far off as most people think. Like cricket, it is a game that heavily values intelligence and small mental lapses can be very costly. Since it’s also fairly slow paced, most people who aren’t familiar with it judge it as ‘boring’, in the same way as they do with cricket. Baseball also has the advantage of sometimes having the occasional ‘breakaway’ plays that have that same rush of excitement/dread (depending which side one is supporting) that one gets when a footballer or rugby player suddenly gets through the line and has a run on goal. Cricket doesn’t really have anything like that. If I had to chose between the two I’d chose cricket, but they both have unique appeals and I very much enjoy them both.
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