This is a site about Pro Yakyu (Japanese Baseball), not about who the next player to go over to MLB is. It's a community of Pro Yakyu fans who have come together to share their knowledge and opinions with the world. It's a place to follow teams and individuals playing baseball in Japan (and Asia), and to learn about Japanese (and Asian) culture through baseball.
It is my sincere hope that once you learn a bit about what we're about here that you will join the community of contributors.
Michael Westbay
(aka westbaystars)
Founder
The first would be the more important project, which would involve doing the "short form" win shares for all of NPB history using the Japanese Baseball Database found in this site. I'd also want to generate a list of everyone who has at least 200 career win shares calculated this way. I'd want to either use MySQL or Access, and/or Java or Visual Basic, though I think I'd only want to use VB with Access (otherwise, I'd prefer using open source stuff, so we can share the coding). I want the code available to myself for future use, but as indicated above, I'm willing to go open source and share it with the world. I would use this for a revision of quite a few of my articles on NPB history, and would see that anyone helping would get credit for doing so in at least the article describing how the ratings were arrived at. I'd also be open to working with you on articles for baseballguru.com on this material, or to seing that you get such stuff published either on the baseballguru.com site or elsewhere on the web.
The other project would have the same programming skills needed and would follow the same rules about availability of the code and credit for the work. This one would use the Lahman database of major leaguers and seeks to determine the most similar players to Ichiro at his age (all as of the end of the 2004 season).
I know I've spoken to Westbay-san about the latter idea, but I suspect his plate is a little full for that one.
Anyway, interested people can contact me here or through baseballguru.com.
Jim Albright