(Warning: Baseball analogies, possibly obscure.) Kenny Peskin wrote: "Because I would have to say that if I could only win one tournament anywhere, I would want to be College Bowl national champion." This is a perfectly understandable position. Because of the name, among other things, winning the CBCI title lends someone a lot of prestige that circuit players seem to underestimate. By analogy, if I were an up-and-coming baseball player and could only land on one prospect list, I'd want to be on Baseball America's. They're the ones with the industry reputation, the name people know best. But if I were having an argument about which ballplayer had the best future based on prospect lists (or, I guess, which ballplayer already *was* the best), I'd easily go with Baseball Prospectus (or even Ron Shandler or John Sickels) over Baseball America. If BA didn't like a guy, so what -- it just means they're so focused on tools that they overlook or underestimate his actual performance. If I were a ballplayer, I'd really want Peter Gammons to like me. If I were rating ballplayers, I wouldn't care what Gammons thought. Gratuitous BP story: On the plane ride home from NAQT ICT, Chad Kubicek mentioned to me that their first book, published in 1996, didn't have a chapter on the St. Louis Cardinals because they ran out of time. I'm not sure if this is true but it does amuse me. Oddly enough, both NAQT and Baseball Prospectus were founded around the same time, both by {fans, players} rather than insiders. They've had roughly similar growth patterns and a similar desire to raise the standards of {baseball analysis, quiz competition} according to their ideals. Oh, and when he saw the authors listed on the BP 2001 cover, R. asked, "is that _our_ Clay Davenport?" (meaning, is that the one who played on the quiz circuit). Indeed yes. Davenport helped Pat Matthews with that Points Created metric. Matt (Probably trying too hard to make the analogy fit but still, it's been on my mind... :-))
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