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Message: <br /><br /> If you are having trouble reading this email, you may view this article online at: http://www.jweekly.com/33745/full/33745/blogger-up-s-f-teen-s-blog-gets-national-notice/ <br /><br /> <b>Blogger up! S.F. teen’s blog gets national notice</b> <br /> Friday, November 9, 2007 | by <p>joe eskenazi </p> <br /><br /><p>Now is the winter of Daniel Rathman’s discontent. But in a few months, it will be made glorious summer by the sun of Scottsdale, Ariz. — when pitchers and catchers report in February and Rathman fires up his baseball blog. <br /><br /> The 17-year-old Rathman is a long-suffering San Francisco Giants fan (is there any other kind?) who, after a particularly dissatisfying 2006 loss, decided to take his frustrations out in writing and start a blog. <br /><br /> It wasn’t long before one of the organizers of MVN.com, a confederation of sports bloggers, stumbled across Rathman’s site and invited him to join. Now thousands of readers debate and even trash-talk a scribe who writes from his parents’ Richmond District home and still has to worry about calculus homework . <br /><br /> “Yeah, I’ve gotten some pretty nasty comments,” confessed Rathman with a smile that reveals his braces. <br /><br /> “My post on A-Rod [Alex Rodriguez] got a lot of comments — I was mad at him for announcing he was opting out of his contract [with the Yankees] during Game 4 of the World Series. I basically called him a jackass. But I don’t usually take those comments to heart.” <br /><br /> Rathman is also Jewishly active. His family attends High Holy Day services at Congregation Emanu-El and he often volunteers at the Jewish Family and Children’s Services. His parents were both born in Ukraine and he knows enough Russian that, if he wanted to, he could write a Russian-language baseball blog.<br /><br /> But between his four weekly blogs, his schoolwork, manning The Bay School basketball team’s shot clock, keeping the soccer team’s stats and playing on the baseball team, Rathman will probably say “nyet” to that possibility.<br /><br /> In grabbing onto baseball and not letting go, Rathman is emulating young Jewish immigrants of the early 20th century who stepped off the boat and adopted America’s national pastime as their own. But unlike Rathman, those immigrants weren’t immersed in sabermetrics. <br /><br /> Sabermetrics, popularized by Michael Lewis’ bestseller “Moneyball,” is a study of baseball’s more esoteric statistics. The system was pioneered by baseball maven Bill James and has been championed by Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane. Instead of concentrating on stats like batting average or earned run average, a “sabermetrician” looks at OPS (on-base percentage plus slugging) or WHIP (walks and hits per innings pitched). <br /><br /> While some self-proclaimed “baseball purists” denigrate sabermetricians as statistics-obsessed nitpickers who don’t understand the beauty of the game, Rathman couldn’t disagree more. <br /><br /> The intricate world of sabermetrics gives Rathman the joy of enjoying baseball on a deeper level than the crack of the bat and an outfielder’s fleet-footed sprint to the wall. At the same time, it reveals how terrible his own statistics were on his high school baseball team. <br /><br /> Like so many hardcore baseball fans, Rathman remembers the exact moment he caught the bug. It was a Giants-Rockies game in 1998, with mercurial left-hander Shawn Estes pitching for the home team. <br /><br /> “I remember he got bombed,” he said, rolling his eyes. Sadly, this was a far from an isolated occurrence. <br /><br /> The Giants lost, 6-3, on a typically frigid and miserable night at Candlestick Park. Naturally, Rathman was hooked. <br /><br /> For now, Rathman is writing about the off-season trade action and keeping tabs on a Giants team that he worries is spending top dollar but heading in the wrong direction. Next year he’s off to college to study journalism or economics. One day he hopes to break into professional sports journalism or work for a baseball statistics agency. <br /><br /> But that’s not his only dream.<br /><br /> “Unrealistically? I’d love to be working in a front office” helping to manage a baseball team. <br /><br /> As someone who knows statistics, he realizes this is a longshot. On the other hand, he notes with a grin, the statistics also didn’t point toward Boston’s Julio Lugo becoming a World Series hero. <br /><br /> Or, to quote the “favorite word” of former St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Joaquin Andujar: “You never know.”</p> <p> </p>

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