Far too often in the early days of the season, you can head over to your favorite baseball blogsite and read the fateful words “small sample size but” in many different forms. It isn’t exactly high treason to base a blogpost on less than stable information but, especially among true stat folks (read: not me) it goes against the entire nature of the beast.
In the early days of the season, it is usually more telling and more informative to look for dynamic differences rather than statistical differences. Things that stand out as changes in process, rather than result.
Jeff Sullivan wrote a very interesting post on Ryan Dempster’s early season strikeout swell for Fangraphs earlier this week. It is Sullivan-ian in its quality and depth of research, keying on many dynamic differences in what Ryan Dempster‘s done since joining the Red Sox.
Ryan Dempster is doing things slightly differently in 2013 but his results are vastly different from previous years. A result of this tinkering and adapting? Perhaps. The product of good fortune in key moments? Absolutely.
