Clay Davenport

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Clay Davenport, a native of Hampton Roads, Virginia, now living in Baltimore, Maryland, is a baseball sabermetrician who co-founded Baseball Prospectus (BP) in 1996. He co-edited several of the Baseball Prospectus annual volumes and is a writer for BaseballProspectus.com. Much of his work for BP is behind the scenes, where he maintains and implements advanced statistics for the website.

Davenport is known for creating the Pythagenport Formula,[1] (designed to find the best exponent for the Pythagoras winning percentage equation), for inventing the statistic Equivalent Average (EqA), and for the "Davenport Translations" or DT's. The DT's are estimated Major League equivalent performance statistics based on player statistics from minor league and international baseball.[1] The DT's were also used to standardize the records of players who played in different eras and playing conditions, not only in different leagues and levels of baseball.

Davenport introduced the DT's to the on-line baseball research community in 1995 as follows:

Hello. My name is Clay Davenport, and these are my Translations of the 1994 baseball season.

While these Translations look like player stats, they are NOT the players' actual statistics. The Translations are an attempt to show how well the player would have performed in a standard league (the American League of 1992), knowing how well he played in his actual league. We know that some leagues are tougher than others; that's why we have the majors, AAA, AA, and so on. We know that some leagues are easier to hit in; we know that some parks favor the pitchers; and we know that these effects are not constant from one year to the next. We can estimate how big a difference each of those makes and correct for them, and that is what the Translations try to do. How well they work I shall leave for you to judge.[2]

A graduate of the University of Virginia, Davenport is employed as a software contractor with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the Satellite and Information Service, where he develops models for predicting rainfall from satellite imagery. He has likened some of that work to his baseball analysis: "The biggest similarity between handling the two types of statistics is that they each involve making forecasts that are there for everyone to see, and you end up being wrong a lot,” Davenport said. “You learn to develop a thick skin."[3]

In 2000, Davenport developed the Hydro-Estimator, a set of computer programs to estimate precipitation in real time. Because of these programs, according to Davenport, “we are now capable of producing rainfall estimates for every system visible from satellite, which allows it to be used for other purposes in the United States and around the world, for example, drought monitoring in Africa, forest fire protection in Brazil and landslide studies in Venezuela.”[4]

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ DT's were first published by Davenport on the rec.sports.baseball Usenet site in 1995, before Baseball Prospectus was founded. See, for example the 1994 figures at http://groups.google.com/group/rec.sport.baseball.analysis/tree/browse_frm/month/1995-02/.
  2. ^ http://groups.google.com/group/rec.sport.baseball.analysis/tree/browse_frm/month/1995-01/. In this initial release as well as later, Davenport explained how the DT's were different from and more useful than the Major League Equivalencies (MLE's) that Bill James had first developed. See also Clay Davenport, "DTs vs. MLEs - A Validation Study," BaseballProspectus.com (January 30, 1998) at http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=49.
  3. ^ John Leslie, "Clay Davenport is Team Member of the Month," NOAA Reports 13, No. 5 (May 2004).
  4. ^ Ibid.
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